Node.js today is often referred to as one of the most popular solutions for backend development. It has been called the the number one most used web technology, according to Stack Overflow’s Developer Survey 2023 bypassing other similar solutions by a big margin. In this article, we will explore the secret of its wide adoption considering various aspects that have contributed to its high standing such as its performance, technical nature, community, ecosystem, and ease of adoption by software companies. All of this will be done with occasional comparisons to other similar backend solutions.
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This article will be very useful for anyone interested in how Node.js compares to other backend languages or environments or those who want to find the best technology to build their next server-based application.
High performance
Application performance comparison is a tricky deal, and there are many articles written about the misleading nature of such tests. In particular, they often measure metrics that do not have anything to do with real situations in which applications are used. So let’s better turn to the nature of performance in general, its underlying architecture.
Event-driven vs Process-driven model
Node.js under the hood uses an asynchronous event-driven model. This allows to utilize processor resources more efficiently and gives a performance advantage for systems that deal with a large amount of concurrent connections. For example, this is the reason why process-driven Java or PHP applications will generally perform worse than Node.js in high-traffic environments like social media platforms, e-commerce, communication tools, and streaming services. The other situation is with servers that have to process large amounts of data and perform high-computational tasks. In an event-driven model, an intense load will slow down the entire server instead of just one process. That’s why building such data-heavy applications like scientific simulations, data analysis, and complex calculations using Node.js is not a good idea, and some other technology should be used instead.
Engine
Also, the other important factor is the compilation engine. Node.js uses an engine called V8 and though it’s not as fast as an engine developed for Go language, it’s still fast enough and, for example, beats straight the Python’s engine which also supports the event-driven model. Node.js in terms of the speed of engine can be compared to Java, which is universally considered to be fast.
Compiled vs Interpreted language
There are two types of programming languages compiled and interpreted. Node.js is based on Javascript which is an interpreted language. And it generally tends to be slower than compiled. That can sometimes lead to situations where for example solutions written in Java will be faster than Node.js. Also, one thing to consider is that interpreted code can be run without a separate compilation step, making development and testing faster, so it’s a double-edged sword situation that has its pros and cons.
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Multiprocessing
The last thing in discussing the nature of performance is the utilization of multiple processor cores. And here lies an apparent drawback of Node.js since it runs only in one core. But it’s important to remember that this is something that can be easily overcome by running multiple server instances, one per processor core. Usually, this is handled by Cluster Module, which is part of Node.js API, or by container orchestration tools, like Kubernetes. This is not something unique to Node.js, for comparison it also applies to Python servers as well. Overall considering the ease of getting around the problem it’s not something worth examining.
Summary of performance
Summarizing everything, here’s a ranking of general comparison of Node.js with other popular solutions, taking into consideration what we have just discussed:
![performance comparisson of programming languages](https://cms.digitaldreamers.dev/wp-content/uploads/2023/12/Picture-1.png)
(ranked based on speed in high-user low-computation server applications, which is the most common type of them)
Rich Ecosystem
After discussing the performance let’s now see what other important factors have contributed to the aforementioned position of Node.js. In this part, we will briefly discuss an ecosystem of libraries that surrounds Node.js.
Npm repository
Node.js has access to the biggest library repository in the world, called npm, which encompasses everything from libraries run in the browser and on the server to those built for mobile and desktop applications using Node.js. The advantage lies in the fact that many of them are platform-agnostic and can be reused across different environments.
Open source
Node.js has the richest amount of open-source libraries in comparison to other backend solutions by a mile and it’s important to mention that the majority of top-rated GitHub projects are in fact javascript modules. This means that they will be free to use and due to overall popularity will be reliable, and in case of any questions or issues with them there always will be an appropriate discussion somewhere with some solutions or suggestions ready to use.
This situation is drastically different for backend servers built with other technologies. Sometimes developers working with them have to actually write many things from scratch (like those working with Go), or experience a lack of support from the long-abandoned libraries (like PHP), or most often have to pay for usage of technologies (Java).
Huge and active community
In recent years Node.js has outgrown other competitors and is still growing, meaning you have libraries that are actively maintained and answers for issues that are not only from the past, that no longer apply to your situation, but are new and relevant. This is very important for developers and no less significant for business owners, since choosing technology that is currently alive and well has a lot of future potential which is an unquestionable advantage. For example, for businesses, it will ensure that they have more time before servers will have to be rewritten or save money since less time will be spent on issues related to libraries. This in no small part drives the overall popularity further.
Ease of adoption by software companies
Versatility and full-stack
The fact that Node.js uses Javascript language puts it in a unique spot, where already existing frontend personnel can be easily trained or even just simply converted to backend or full-stack developers (sidenote: most frontend developers are familiar with Node.js anyway). Uneven or uncertain speed of different parts of functionalities, or complex solutions that require both server-side and client-side knowledge can benefit greatly from javascript-only approach with full-stack developers on board.
Ease of finding developers
On the other side, the previously discussed size of the community of Node.js also means that it’s much easier to find developers for projects.
Conclusion
In summary, considering the great performance, react ecosystem, huge actively growing community together with flexibility and speed of development of Node.js it’s not surprising that today it has become such a popular technology for backend development outgrowing different alternatives that we have observed. Although it has some drawbacks and different pros and cons that we have briefly discussed, and each situation should be examined on a case-to-case basis, overall for the general server application Node.js is one of the best choices that exist today.
Thanks for reading.