August 18, 2022
Golang vs NodeJs: What you should know the differences between them
Contents
Introduction
This article will give you an overview of Golang and Nodejs. All of these provide their own set of benefits and drawbacks. It should be used one or the other depending on your needs.
What Is Golang and Nodejs?
While JavaScript is becoming more popular, there has long been a demand among developers for server-side programming capabilities. Nodejs took a significant step in that direction by introducing the callback concept and being event-driven. Nodejs is a platform built on Chrome's JavaScript runtime for easily building fast and scalable network applications. Nodejs uses an event-driven, non-blocking I/O model that makes it lightweight and efficient, perfect for data-intensive real-time applications that run across distributed devices.
Golang was designed by Robert Greisemer, Rob Pike and Ken Thompson at Google in 2007. The Golang design and development team has studied the C language very closely. They wanted to retain some of the strengths of C in the new programming language they were designing. Golang has many similarities with C in terms of syntax. Golang is a statically typed and compiled programming language.
Examples of Companies Using Nodejs
Examples of Companies Using Go
Performance
Performance is an essential component of any scalable system, which is why developers adore Nodejs. To demonstrate, here are some of the best Nodejs applications. In addition to improving performance through caching, let's compare Nodejs vs Golang, with the former processing faster in terms of sheer speed.
Golang provides the same performance as C and C++, which is great since Go compiles its code directly to machine code without the use of a virtual machine, which halts the compilation process.
In addition, Go includes a debugger that automatically frees up unused memory spaces, increasing available memory for faster processing. This feature also reduces the risk of security flaws caused by memory leakage.
Nodejs, on the other hand, renders utilizes the fastest JavaScript engine, known as V8. Nodejs code is easy to recycle, making it an excellent choice for event-based applications that update data in real-time. This language is also widely used for online gaming, instant messaging and video chats.
Scalability
While both NodeJS and Golang help you create scalable applications, Golang has better concurrency support. This makes it a better choice for coding scalable applications.
Concurrency
Go uses coroutines called goroutines. A goroutine is a lightweight thread managed by the Go runtime. Communication between goroutines is done very neatly using channels. Meanwhile, Node supports less neat concurrency through the use of the event-callback mechanism. However, for a lot of applications, working with Nodejs promises and soon async generator support (also known as "semi-coroutines") will suffice. Something like the Koa framework already supports the async generator approach in Node.
Error Handling
Nodejs has typically handled errors by using the try-catch exception handling technique, in which errors are caught only if they occur, enabling developers to debug errors quite quickly and efficiently.
Golang distinguishes between compile-time and runtime errors. This inconsistency causes confusion among developers and has resulted in a standard method for handling exceptions. However, Go developers believe that the language will be improved further with the upcoming latest version, including better error handling, error values and generics.
Development Tools
The number of standard Go packages grows steadily, now there are over 100 and Go community packages can be found easily. While there aren't as many different, developer-friendly framework apps to choose from as Node, you can search for packages from the Go community, which currently has over 58,000 packages to use and develop.
On the other hand, the current number of Node packages is more than 100,000. This means that there are a lot of platforms already built and it can make software projects certainly easier and/or cheaper to implement. Node's tools are also great.