NodeJS vs Golang: Which one to choose for your next project?
Building a web or mobile app gets challenging for companies and developers when it comes to choosing the right tech stack.
As there are a variety of programming languages available to pick from, it gets harder for developers to choose the most suitable one for the project. Though the list is lengthy and the languages vary widely, making it is difficult to choose the best option for your individual situation. In this blog, we’ll compare NodeJS vs Golang to help you decide which language is ideal for your project. But first, let’s get the basics straight before we begin our comparison.
What is NodeJS?
NodeJS is an open-source JavaScript runtime environment created for the server-side development of both complex and simple scalable network applications. NodeJS runs on various operating systems such as Windows, Linux, and macOS.
The foundation of NodeJS is Chrome’s V8 JavaScript engine, which parses and executes JavaScript code in a Chrome engine in the background. For creating and delivering scalable server-side applications, rich libraries are there in NodeJS.
What is Golang?
Golang was released in 2009, the same year as NodeJS. The engineers at Google created Golang, commonly known as Go, which is open-source, statistically typed, multipurpose, cross-platform, compiled, and quick programming language to solve certain problems by combining the strengths and eliminating the shortcomings of existing programming languages.
In terms of speed and syntax, the high-efficiency programming language Go is comparable to the C programming language.
Because Golang is so well-liked by web developers, some may view it as the perfect savior for the industry. But NodeJS is equally as good. Both are great options based on individual preferences, albeit they are in a close race. Let’s examine a couple of the areas where the two technologies vary more closely in order to end the long-lasting debate.
NodeJS vs Golang: Comparison
Performance
Golang has a little advantage over NodeJS in terms of performance and raw speed. Golang is directly assembled into the machine code and doesn’t need an interpreter. As a result, Golang performs at a level comparable to that of low-level languages like C++. Golang is just as effective as NodeJS at IO operations.
Performance-wise, Golang slightly outperforms NodeJS. The optimized and improved single-threaded NodeJS enhances the efficiency and the V8 JavaScript engine makes sure that the application runs without any assistance or requirement of an interpreter.
Conclusion- In terms of performance, Golang and NodeJS are on par.
Learning Curve
The learning curve for NodeJS is often less because JavaScript is already widely used. This makes learning NodeJS for programmers easier than the Go language.
Full-stack developers must understand everything there is to know about a full-stack framework in Go, including its particular processes, ideas, rules, pointers, strict typing, interfaces, goroutines, database connections, and many other things.
For your web app project, this means that if you employ a Golang application developer, you or a member of your team must also be familiar with Golang.
You’ll probably need to hire frontend developers separately because Golang is only for backend development.
Conclusion- Compared to Golang, NodeJS is significantly easier to learn.
Scalability and Concurrency
In terms of scalability, Google intended to create a programming language for creating robust and complex enterprise-scale, production-ready applications. Scalability was their major priority, which they succeeded in achieving.
Go uses goroutines, which enable dependable and simple thread execution that may be done concurrently and smoothly. Go is the ideal scalable programming language because of these goroutines.
Go uses concurrency to process more than a thousand requests per second. Go is more scalable and concurrent than NodeJS just because of this feature. It’s also important to remember that NodeJS is an asynchronous single-threaded JavaScript engine.
CPU-bound processes can occasionally stop the event loop in NodeJS’ single-threaded design and make your program run slowly. You end up with a slow app and annoyed users as a result.
Conclusion- Go clearly wins over NodeJS in terms of Scalability and concurrency.
Error Handling
NodeJS uses the traditional throw-catch error handling approach, which is well-liked by programmers. With this traditional method, errors are promptly displayed and fixed before moving on to the next step. Many web developers prefer NodeJS over Golang when comparing the two languages’ error handling because they are more accustomed to Node’s throw-catch methodology.
On the other hand, Golang performs independent runtime and compilation error checks. While runtime problems require specific management, compile-time errors are typically connected to syntax and can be fixed in the code. You must manually examine this function’s return value. Studies are now being conducted to improve handling procedures in the upcoming Golang version.
Conclusion- In this case, NodeJS and Golang are comparable. This is a TIE.
Development Tools
Go has fewer libraries and packages than NodeJS in terms of development tools. Because of this, the developer of Go applications still needs to perform a significant amount of manual setup work, requiring thorough research.
A large community for NodeJS has created multiple libraries and packages for programmers. This large community also offers additional assistance on websites like Stackoverflow, which boosts productivity when developing a product.
Conclusion- When comparing developer tools, NodeJS handily wins.
NodeJS vs Go: Which companies are using them?
Companies are using cutting-edge technologies to produce the highest quality and super-fast performance to thrive in the quickly evolving business environment. Let’s see the companies that use NodeJS vs Golang.
NodeJS
- Uber
- BBC
- Medium
- Intel
Go
- Netflix
- eBay
- Trello
- PayPal
Closing notes:
Having thoroughly compared NodeJS and Golang, it is difficult to choose a winner because both have pros and cons. Therefore, when it comes to NodeJS vs Golang, your choice will depend exclusively on the project in question.
If you want to know more about the comparison of these two and find out how your business can benefit from NodeJS development services or Golang development services, get in touch with us now!
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