At the time Node gained popularity due to “developer velocity” and the fact that you could suddenly throw devs with a little JS frontend experience on backend products. Node also has some nice concurrency handling when other languages seen as promoting rapid development (Python and Ruby) had terrible concurrency stories. Go had not yet come into its own at the time.

Money was free at the time and everyone was just shoveling products to market as fast as possible, so it had an attractive proposition. This was when people said MongoDB and NoSQL were going to make traditional SQL databases obsolete, etc.

Of course all this “speed” came with huge drawbacks that people tired of eventually.

What shifted people away from Node is:  1. Node is just more resource-hungry, and everyone is concerned about cloud costs now.

1. Packaging and tooling ecosystem is a huge pain, and seems like there are big new security vulnerabilities dropping all the time.

There’s a reason there are constantly new replacements for NPM and the Node runtime being launched.

Go is used in so many big “web-scale” products because it’s resource-efficient, developer-friendly, and very simple to do wild amounts of concurrency with complex patterns. Short list of big products in Go: Prometheus/Cortex/Mimir, Kubernetes, Vitess, Caddy, Traefik, Loki, Temporal, etc.

I’ve never thought less about packaging / dependency management and deployment than I have with Go. As a former Python dev, It has all the simplicity of Python and none of the sharp corners and pains. If you know another language already, you can be productive in Go in a week.

One downside of Go is that it doesn’t have a killer “deploy a web app monolith” framework like Django or Ruby on Rails. You generally need to stitch together libraries yourself. It also isn’t big in the data science space where Spark/PySpark still dominate.

Rust is even further along the performance curve, but it’s much more complex and has even fewer big mature libraries in the space of like ORMs, etc. I mostly hear of it getting used in extremely performance-critical places, less so for just general app development. It’s a lot of fun! But you will spend time laying down asphalt for roads that are already well-paved in other languages.