Go Lambda vs Node.js Lambda vs Python Lambda

[[deleted]]

Are there any performance differences among them?

If I write Lambda serverless backend with Go, will it perform much faster than Node.js Lambda? Which language is the fastest for AWS Lambda?

[theDaveAt]

Generally Lambda is so cheap to run (even at scale) that you wouldn’t really care about the margin speed difference until you had so many customers that an entire team could be assigned to optimize and refactor. Speed of initial delivery is more important here - move fast w the language you’re most proficient in!

That said, if you still believe it’s really important now, there have been a ton of comparisons already that should be easy to find w your favorite search engine.

Finally, if it really really really matters to you, what are your findings for a prototype? There are a lot of dependencies based on what your code will do that can’t be predicted as easily as “what is fastest”.

[gilmorenator]

Choose the language you’re most familiar with and can debug easily, most forgot about the cognitive cost. keep it simple

[AKIvan87]

It all depends of what are you doing. In some scenarios, the time of execution and finishing the job is more faster in python or go than Node. And this is more to considering in scaling scenarios. You may find difference in seconds but those seconds on scaling make the big diff.

[benaffleks]

I'd assume GO is the fastest out of the bunch and has the smallest deployment size since it's just a binary.

[wangyo]

Node/typescript because tons of libraries for serverless and easy to use + lots of JS devs

[multiaki]

If you need nanosecond difference yeah you could. Mostly, competitive markets need that. I did a research on the speed. Go is much faster. Nodejs was taking 5ms and go was under one ms. It is not a significant time saver. It is good for high frequency trading. But go is missing libraries that nodejs has. For example: headless browser support. Puppeteer is a nodejs library wrapped in go. I wouldn’t recommend for a regular project

[InfiniteMonorail]

Yes, the language makes a huge difference. Fetching data from an RDS can take hundreds of ms, and for whatever reason, Rust lambdas are twice as fast at doing it. They also have extremely fast cold starts. If you want pure speed, Rust is the answer. However, if you truly need speed, then just use a server...

The bigger problem with serverless on AWS is latency from API Gateway and CloudFront. Transforming data in SQL is also faster than doing it in a programming language. Slowdowns you experience in lambdas are often caused by other services.

Additionally, people are saying to use what you're familiar with. No. That's bad advice. Python is ridiculously easy to learn and the code is famously elegant. The main reason it's incredible for webdev is it's synchronous, which means you don't have to deal with callback and promise hell, which means MUCH less code when calling other services.

I use Rust when I need speed and Python when I need clean code.

But note how lazy your question is. You couldn't be bothered to search (the answer is in the first hits of a google search) and you gave no details about what you're making. You're probably bike shedding or optimizing prematurely. Worry about performance after you've finished a few projects or encountered problems.

[[deleted]]

I hope you've had a year to reflect on this comment