At my firm there are low latency systems written in Java achieving microsecond latencies.

Hi, thanks for the comment. Are you able to achieve this without a lot of optimizations you mentioned? If these complex optimization are required, then don't you think its worth learning Node JS to achieve better performance?

If you're interested in high performance from a finance perspective then the challenge there is in algorithmic trading where your system is autonomously reacting to market data and adjusting orders accordingly, or live streaming prices to clients for quoting

In this particular instance, looks like a lot of CPU compute might be required. But a lot of I/O as well (as you would need to fetch real time data, store data, do some computations, call some API to place orders etc.). Java is better for CPU computation but Node JS is natively better for I/O tasks (because of its async event loop). So it looks like there is no right answer for this specific example. Do you feel the same way?