For Web development, there is an array of advanced technologies. But, which technology to use to make the development successful? Every development process starts with this particular turmoil.
The most vital part of any application depends on the programming language or a framework developers use. Choosing the right tools makes your development journey more effective and highly scalable.
To help you, we have compared the two most popular technologies Node.js vs Golang. Both Tech/languages have evolved over a period of time and have gained huge popularity among the developers. In this post, we will help you choose the best technology for you to project with this comparison, Node.js vs Golang!
Let’s get started!

What is Node js?

Node js is an open source JavaScript framework. It is built on Chrome’s V8 JavaScript engine and it is a cross-platform environment mainly used for creating web servers. Node.js has a complete library of various JS modules that makes the web and mobile application development a simplified process.
Node js was initially developed as a platform to execute JS code. It allows developers to write both client-side and server-side code without having to learn two different programming languages.
Node.js is a widely adopted JavaScript framework for full stack and backend development. Today, Node js offers an event-driven, asynchronous I/O model specifically designed to build highly scalable server-side applications using javascript.

Benefits of using Node js for development

• Full-stack JavaScript
• High extensibility
• Real-time data streaming
• Extended support
• Fast processing

What is Golang?

Go or Golang is an open source programming language developed by Google. It is a statically-typed, compiled, multi-purpose programming language. It is specially designed to build highly scalable and high-performance applications.
Golang gained popularity through its an effective way of handling concurrent programming. It is used to build cloud-based interfaces, real-time apps, and microservices. It resembles the code structure of C for safety and Python for speed. Golang language can make the code writing process more easy and efficient.

Benefits of using Golang for development

• Virtual machine dependencies
• High Scalability
• Clean coding
• Memory management
• Garbage collection
• Cross-compiling

Quick Comparison: NodeJS vs Golang

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Node.js vs Golang: Comparison of Key features

Performance

Performance is one of the crucial factors to consider as it greatly affects the user experiences of your application. Golang is ideal for building microservices. Node.js is considered as one of the best backend solutions as it has inherited its asynchronous nature from JavaScript.
As Node.js is a JavaScript framework, which is interpreted, it takes more time to execute the code written in Node.js. Whereas Golang has no virtual machine and it compiles to machine code which makes the programs execute faster without warm up time. In terms of raw performance, Golang beats Node.js. Developers can easily achieve better performance with Golang. In the case of real-time performance, both Node.js and Go have equally good performance.

Scalability

The Golang programming language was developed with scalability in mind. Goroutines are the biggest asset for Go, which allows multiple threads to be performed concurrently for improving CPU efficiency and increase app performance.
On the other hand, web application using Node.js works a bit differently. It is single-threaded making the instructions are executed in sequences. The concurrent programming in JavaScript is done using event callbacks which makes the concurrency inefficient and the scalability of Node.js is less functional.

Development Tools

Good availability of genuine tools can facilitate the development and reduce the cost of web development. Node.js has a large variety of tools, frameworks, and libraries to build any kind of application that a developer wishes for. In fact, Javascript has a huge community that offers extended support for development tasks.
In recent times Golang has become quite a popular language, yet it is considered new. It has a decent number of libraries, tools, and packages, but comparing with Node.js, Go has fewer tools available.

Error handling

Error handling in Node.js is implemented through a traditional mechanism. On the other hand, the Go language has a unique approach. Golang demands you to implement an explicit error checking. This means the error handling functionality can help you shorten the development time.
With Node JS, it is more a conventional approach, the errors are displayed and corrected immediately before performing any further operation. When we compare the error handling mechanism of Node.js vs Golang, most of the developers are quite familiar with the throw-catch technique.

Learning Curve

If you are already familiar with JavaScript, then learning node.js will be a piece of cake. In the programming world, JavaScript is the most popular language used in web development over a decade. There are various learning resources available both online and offline. Moreover, the huge community of JavaScript developers will share the expertise and offer assistance when required.
Golang is considered relatively as a new programming language. It has a different approach to development when compared to JavaScript. It follows a particular process, approach, interfaces, pointers, and rules. The learning resources are relatively few and developers have to carry out intensive research to get reliable sources for learning.

Conclusion

So, we have covered the features you can look into before choosing a Language/stack for development. As you can see both are Node JS and Golang are growing faster. It is quite hard to say which one is better over the other. Choosing a technology greatly depends on the type and characteristics of the application you want to build. All you need is the right tools to support your web development.
NodeJS and Goang are good at different things. Golang is ideal for microservices and enterprise-scale applications that can handle heavy loads. On the other hand, Node JS offers a wide range of ready-made solutions for almost any kind of development. Golang is mostly used as Backend and Node JS can also be used in frontend developments.
Choosing the right tech stack can help you dramatically reduce the custom software development cost and time.
Can’t decide which tech/stack to choose? Drop your questions and we’ll help you to make the right decision depending on your project.