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Which is most powerful, Golang or Node.js?

They have different strengths, I'd say neither. But if you have a specific purposes one could be better suited for your work than the other.

We'll compare both Golang and Node.js

Concurrency
Golang is far superior to Node.js for concurrency. Golang can start hundreds of thousands of threads (goroutines) and it would be fine, not the case for Node.js

Ecosystem
Nodejs has a larger ecosystem with very good 3rd-party tooling. With nodejs you can build single page apps written end-to-end in javascript.

Performance
If you need high performance, Go is a better choice. Node.js is an interpreted language based on JavaScript, that is slower than a compiled language like Go.

Golang compiles to fast native code. Node.js runs JavaScript that is much slower.

Learning Curve
Go needs to be learned from the start (learn Go). But all web developers already know Javascript. Javascript is one of the most known languages.

That makes it much easier to start with Node.js than Golang for many developers. That said, Golang is not hard to learn either.

So to create a short list:

Pros of Go:

  • Faster than Node
  • Concurrency model
  • Has a standard library
  • Static binaries, portable binaries

Pros of Node:

  • Has a larger ecosystem
  • Good 3rd-party tooling.
  • JavaScript

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