Go for Backend Services: A Node.js Developer's Perspective

I've built most of my career on Node.js and TypeScript. I still reach for them first. But there are cases where Go is the better tool, and understanding when to switch has made me a better engineer.

Go's concurrency model is its killer feature. Goroutines are lightweight, you can spawn millions without running out of memory. Channels provide safe communication between goroutines. For workloads that involve heavy concurrent I/O, processing thousands of webhook events, crawling hundreds of URLs, or handling high-throughput message queues. Go handles this naturally where Node.js requires careful async orchestration.

The deployment story is compelling. Go compiles to a single static binary. No node_modules. No runtime. No dependency hell. Your Docker image can be FROM scratch, literally an empty filesystem with just your binary. The resulting image is often under 20MB compared to 200MB+ for a typical Node.js application.

Performance characteristics differ in important ways. Node.js is fast for I/O-bound work thanks to the event loop. Go is fast for everything. I/O, CPU-bound computation, and concurrent workloads. If your service does significant data processing, JSON marshaling, or computation alongside serving HTTP requests, Go will handle it more efficiently.

The type system is different from TypeScript but equally valuable. Go's types are simpler, no generics (well, limited generics now), no union types, no conditional types. This simplicity is intentional. The code is more verbose but harder to get wrong. Error handling through multiple return values forces you to handle errors at every call site.

The standard library is production-grade. net/http is a real HTTP server, not a minimal abstraction. encoding/json handles serialization. database/sql provides a clean database interface. You can build a production API with just the standard library, which isn't true of Node.js.

Where Go falls short: rapid prototyping. The verbose error handling and lack of generics (compared to TypeScript) means more code for simple CRUD operations. For a typical web API with a database backend, NestJS with Prisma gets you to production faster. Go's advantages show up as the system grows in complexity and scale.

My rule: if the service is request-response with a database, Node.js. If the service involves heavy concurrency, background processing, or needs to be deployed in resource-constrained environments, Go. Both are excellent, the skill is knowing which to reach for.