The backend is without a doubt the most vital element in applications. Choosing the best language is essential to ensure high effectiveness and scalability.
Software developers and software programmers can choose from a wide range of advanced programming languages, but choosing the right one for your employer’s needs can be daunting.
We have elaborated a comprehensive comparison of Golang vs NodeJS to help you understand their differences and strengths.
What is Go?
Go, as software developers refer to Golang, is a multi-purpose, statically-typed, open-source language. Its garbage collection handling, its dynamic interfaces and memory safety make it a favorite among many programmers. It's usually preferred for networking applications, microservices, real-time application and cloud-base interfaces.
What is Node?
Node.js is a very popular environment among developers that use JavaScript to build cross-platform applications. Node.js attains high scalability levels and can maintain a large number of websockets connections and continues to evolve. It has great features such as event-driven and non-blocking(asynchronous) I/O models. Because it's written in JavaScript it's easier for developers to write both server-side and client-side scripts.
The comparison
To understand their advantages and disadvantages we have compared both languages through four significant aspects: performance, web development and tools, error handling and scalability.
Performance
As we mentioned before, Go’s memory management capabilities like garbage collectors and native goroutines allow it to have a robust minimalist structure. Its lightweight platform is based partly on C and C++. It has a really fast compile and startup time thanks to it being pre-compiled to machine code. All in all, Go is better for raw performance and computation.
On the other hand Node JS, as it is written in JavaScript, has async promises that let you keep on following the main course of your application while executing the other processes. This is very important because in reality it only supports one thread, but because of these features it comes off as a multi-threaded language. Still, Node is somewhat slower as it can’t offer the raw performance of CPU or memory-bound tasks. However the result will depend on the characteristics of the specific app you are coding for.
Referring to real life performance, for example talking about database connection or network communication, both perform equally well.
Web Development and tools
Node JS cannot handle the complex computations for large network servers that Go was actually designed for. Also, Go is concurrent and therefore faster, which makes enterprise applications more efficient. On the other hand, Node has to go through many shortcuts to be able to run numerous processes simultaneously.
Node JS has 800,000 blocks dedicated to web development. It has libraries available for developers, frameworks and many tools. While Go may not have that many building blocks, it does offer capabilities like go fmt, go doc, go mod, and go run. These allow developers to construct web servers without having to resort to other frameworks.
One big contrast between both languages is their ease of use. Node JS requires you to install an interpreter on workstations for JavaScript to run, while Golang allows users to dump it wherever because it is compiled into a single static binary.
Scalability
Goroutines capabilities help in handling parallel threads in a reliable and effective way making Go very scalable. NodeJS has a weaker parallel process. Also, Go can support and manage 1000 concurrent requests per second. Node JS single-thread mechanism, although somewhat solved by its architecture that let’s activities run in the background, still makes the language slower as tasks can’t be completed simultaneously.
Error Handling
Go requires explicit error checking. The compile-time and run-time errors are handled differently which raises problems for the developers, which means the error codes are returned afterwards. This problem might soon be solved as the Go creators are working on new functionalities.
Programmers love the throw-catch error handling mechanism that Node JS implements. It's traditional and it allows for errors to be displayed and corrected instantly before moving on to another operation.
So, Node.js or Golang?
Both technologies have their advantages. Whether you are seeking a golang developer or a node Js developer, what is important to examine first is the size of the project and structure. Go enables high productivity and use of multi-core power, and Node is a top pick backend development technology because of its fully equipped environment. Performance wise, Go has the lead but Node.JS is rich in simplicity and tools.
At Nexton we understand that great results come from great senior talent. Which is why we seek to connect senior software programmers with great companies that are prepared to challenge their knowledge and help them develop their careers further. If you are seeking new challenges, contact us, we will walk you through our process to make your dream job a reality.
