They were made roughly around the same time to be fair, but Go's standard library was richer at the time I thought? Even so, JavaScript hate it or love it (I both hate and love it) is massive by virtue of being the primary scripting language for front-end web. I am fully aware of its backend capabilities, but Go gave us: C-like syntax, natively compiled, and a rich OOTB standard library that Google uses in production. Even YouTube adopted Go early on and made Vitess which was a "middle-man" for MySQL which helped YouTube with their back-end starting in 2010, it would help with query routing and sharding, connection pooling, query safety and even optimizing queries before they got to MySQL, as well as row-level caching.
Honestly I'm not trying to downplay Node, I respect Node for what it was and is, but Go punched above its weight early on too.
I think the industry was starved for a back-end language that was simple, compiled natively (removing a lot of environmental setup overhead) and was production ready out of the box.
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They were made roughly around the same time to be fair, but Go's standard library was richer at the time I thought? Even so, JavaScript hate it or love it (I both hate and love it) is massive by virtue of being the primary scripting language for front-end web. I am fully aware of its backend capabilities, but Go gave us: C-like syntax, natively compiled, and a rich OOTB standard library that Google uses in production. Even YouTube adopted Go early on and made Vitess which was a "middle-man" for MySQL which helped YouTube with their back-end starting in 2010, it would help with query routing and sharding, connection pooling, query safety and even optimizing queries before they got to MySQL, as well as row-level caching.
Honestly I'm not trying to downplay Node, I respect Node for what it was and is, but Go punched above its weight early on too.
I think the industry was starved for a back-end language that was simple, compiled natively (removing a lot of environmental setup overhead) and was production ready out of the box.