Discussion on: Golang, it was love at first sight.

• It's simpler to read and write
• Better tooling
• Easier to ship
• Generally will perform better, especially on CPU bound tasks

This post is about my subjective passion for Go, but I can be objective too to answer your question. I'm sure others provided better answers but I'll try to sum it up in a few examples.

• One of the creators if Nodejs can answer too
• parallelism (trough concurrency)
• low level system programming (see opencontainers-runc)
• one binary deploy (I don't consider embeding v8 and a browser one binary :)) as electron)
• performance (is a compiled language)
• build a file storage system that holds over 500PB of data
• real-time services that needs to answer in under 10ms
• shrink down your hosting costs and still handle tons of more traffic, see the story of ipify from node to Go
• sync PB of data between 125 data centers across the globe in real time
• build distributed performance sensitive databases (CockroachDB and Dgraph)
• more success stories and

Basically you can see Go good for building databases, proxies, servers and CLI tools, while NodeJS keeping the business logic and websites.

Sure there are things that NodeJS can do and Go cant! I even keep a list of how many things JS can do nowdays and is getting bigger every month!

I even see them complementary in mid/large size products and teams. If you already have a NodeJS large app you can extract the golden paths that needs to be fast responsive in small go services, keeping the benefits of both languages (like finding developers).

For me personally, after 8yrs+ of JS (not node) in production I can say Go brought me inner peace, stability, solved many engineering problems I faced in real products and simplify the entire building process while making faster and more resilient apps, with only a few keywords. Is not the holy grail! it is just better for me and it suites my next career needs.