Go vs Node.js for Microservices: Comparison Differences Between Go and Node.js

Should I use Go or Node.js for Microservices?

Many software developers are wondering, is it better to use Go or Node.js for microservices development 🤔? In general, the creation of microservices is not tied to a particular programming language or framework, so the problem of Go language vs Node.js is not critical.

However, it should be considered that certain languages, or frameworks, make the implementation of REST API and microservices architecture principles more economical, fast, simple and efficient. Both Go and Node.js can be used to develop microservices, but their effectiveness and feasibility for this task is different.

To better understand which is better, Go or Node.js for REST server, and for microservices, you should familiarize yourself with the basic information about these microservices development options. The specialists of our software development company have prepared for you a description of Go, Node.js, as well as their comparison.

All About Go for Microservices Development

Go is astonishing in its speed, scalability, and concurrency support. Many developers use Go for web app development. Go has several advantages for building microservices, which is why it is so popular. If you are unsure whether to convert node.js to go, you should know that the concurrency implemented in Go effectively speeds up work on multiple cores. The syntax of Go is compact and simple to parse. Another advantage of Go is that it compiles faster than many other programming languages, saving developers time and organizations money.

If you were interested in use cases for Go over Node.js, you should know, that Go is suitable for all use-cases where developers need performance, scalability, and programmer-friendly language syntax. Moreover, Go provides developers with powerful frameworks designed specifically for microservices development:

• Go Micro

Go Micro is a pluggable RPC based framework for developing microservices in Go. It provides the fundamental building blocks for microservices development and offers such goodies as API gateway, load balancing, interactive CLI, PRC client, service proxy, server packages, templates, message encoding, web dashboards and others. Given the power of this framework, in the opposition of Node.js vs Go for API, many developers prefer go.

• Go Kit

Go kit is a programming toolkit for creating microservices in Go. This programming toolkit fills a gap in the Go ecosystem, giving developers the ability to use a set of libraries and packages to create microservices efficiently and quickly. Go kit is optimized for domain-driven design, SOLID principles, hexagonal architecture, and explicit dependencies. Many developers have decided to switch from Node.js to Go because of the advantages of this framework.

• Gizmo

Gizmo is an open source Go-based microservices toolkit. With Gizmo, software developers get a toolkit that simplifies the technical side of the microservices' development process. This microservice toolkit has the facilities for server implementation and high-level building components like configs and pubsub packages.

All About Node.js for Microservices Development

Node.js is a great cross-platform, back-end JavaScript runtime environment, for both start-ups and enterprises that want to build microservices architectures. If you are wondering whether to convert go to node.js project, keep in mind that many businesses rely on Node.js microservices for high efficiency, reduced costs, and improved productivity. Node JS is designed with the V8 runtime environment, which allows software developers to develop ultra-fast microservices. Furthermore, Node.js provides developers with next useful frameworks for microservices development:

• Moleculer

Moleculer is an open-source, fast, scalable, modern and powerful progressive microservices framework for NodeJS. This framework helps developers to build scalable, efficient, and reliable microservices. The main features of this framework are built-in service registry, load-balanced requests, pluggable loggers, many fault tolerance options and others.

• Nest

Nest is a cutting-edge Node.js framework based on Express.JS, that is designed for building efficient, scalable, and enterprise-grade microservices. Nest.js provide developers with a precise structural model that allows them to build microservices smoothly. Moreover, this framework provides developers with the ability of dependency injection, through which a module can be injected into another module, making it much easier to reuse the code.

• Seneca

Seneca is a robust microservices toolkit for Node.js. Many developers wonder about writing an app in Go vs Node.js, and can't decide. This toolkit provides developers with useful plugins for microservices development. Seneca helps developers to write clean, organized code that can be scaled and deployed at any time. This toolkit is outstanding, it has a great potential, and developers can use it to develop fast and reliable microservices.

How does Go Compare to Node.js?

So, what to choose for microservices development? Both Go and Node.js can provide excellent results in microservices development, they have grown and improved over time, as well as they have gained immense popularity among developers around the world.

I think it's obvious that there is no definite answer here because each of these options has its advantages and disadvantages. However, Go has several significant benefits over Node.js.

Performance

Performance is certainly one of the most important factors to consider when developing microservices. Go is an ideal open-source programming language for developing microservices. Go has no virtual machine and compiles to machine code, allowing microservices to run faster and leads to faster release cycles.

Given that Node.js is an open-source, cross-platform JavaScript runtime environment, which is interpreted, it takes a long time to execute code written in Node.js 🙄. So, in terms of Go vs Node.js for microservices performance, Go is better than Node.js. Go developers can easily achieve better performance than Node.js developers.

Prototyping

When developing microservices, you start with prototyping. Go is designed to create reliable, secure and optimized software. If you were looking for differences between Go and Node.js in terms of prototyping, we will explain them now. With Go, developers can create prototypes that are more production-ready than those made with Node.js. However, Go is less flexible for rapid prototyping.

Node.js allows developers to create prototypes quickly, which speeds up time to market. However, microservices prototypes built quickly are usually not reliable. Therefore, if you plan to develop microservices based on a prototype and want to achieve high-quality results, then in the Golang vs NodeJS opposition it is better to choose Go.

Debugging

Errors and bugs have a negative impact on the performance of microservices. So, it is vital to find and fix any bugs as quickly as possible. Many developers are curious about the differences between Go and Node.js for microservices debugging. Go is a strongly, statically typed imperative language in which developers make fewer errors with variables since they are known at compile time.

The debugging process in Node.js is more complex because JavaScript is a dynamically typed language in which variable errors are almost inevitable. JavaScript asynchronous nature makes it difficult to locate problems. Therefore, Go provides early error detection and is better than Node.js for microservices debugging.

Scalability

Go was designed with scalability opportunity in mind. Go provides a powerful feature known as Goroutines. A goroutine is a special type of function that executes simultaneously with other goroutines, which allows multiple threads to perform simultaneously. Go runtime can easily create thousands of goroutines in a matter of milliseconds. This improves processor efficiency and increases the overall performance and scalability of microservices.

Microservices that use Node.js are single-threaded, making instructions to execute sequentially. Concurrency in JavaScript is accomplished with events and callbacks, which makes the concurrency ineffective. From this, we can conclude that the scalability of microservices in Node.js is less functional than in Go.