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ExpressJS vs Go: What are the differences?

Introduction

In this article, we will explore the key differences between ExpressJS and Go for building web applications.

  1. Performance: One of the major differences between ExpressJS and Go is their performance. Go is a compiled language that is known for its speed and efficiency, making it ideal for building highly performant web applications. On the other hand, ExpressJS is based on Node.js, which is an interpreted language, leading to slightly slower performance compared to Go.

  2. Concurrency: Go has built-in support for concurrency with its goroutines and channels, allowing it to handle large numbers of concurrent requests efficiently. This makes Go a great choice for building services that require high levels of concurrency, such as real-time applications or APIs. In contrast, ExpressJS does not have built-in support for concurrency and may require additional modules or frameworks to achieve similar levels of concurrency.

  3. Language Ecosystem: ExpressJS is built on top of Node.js, which has a large and vibrant ecosystem of libraries and frameworks, making it easy to find and integrate third-party modules into your project. Go, on the other hand, has a smaller ecosystem compared to Node.js, with fewer libraries and frameworks available. While Go does have its own standard library that covers most common use cases, you may need to write more code from scratch when compared to using ExpressJS.

  4. Ease of Use: ExpressJS is known for its simplicity and ease of use, making it a popular choice among developers who are already familiar with JavaScript or Node.js. It has a minimalistic and intuitive syntax, making it easy to set up routes, handle middleware, and build APIs. Go, on the other hand, has a steeper learning curve, especially for developers who are not familiar with static typing and compiled languages. However, once you get used to its syntax and concepts, Go can be quite productive and efficient.

  5. Error Handling: ExpressJS provides a middleware-based approach to error handling, where you can define error handling middleware functions to catch and handle errors in your application. This gives you fine-grained control over how errors are handled and allows for easy error propagation. Go, on the other hand, uses the built-in error type along with the defer and panic/recover mechanisms for error handling. While this approach can be powerful and flexible, it requires a good understanding of the Go language and its error handling patterns.

  6. Scalability: When it comes to scalability, Go shines as it has built-in support for efficient handling of concurrent requests and horizontal scaling. Its lightweight goroutines and efficient memory management make it highly scalable, allowing you to handle large amounts of traffic without much overhead. ExpressJS, being based on Node.js, can also be scaled horizontally using load balancers, but it may not handle as many concurrent requests as efficiently as Go.

In summary, Go offers better performance, concurrency support, and scalability compared to ExpressJS, whereas ExpressJS has a larger ecosystem and is easier to get started with. The choice between the two depends on your specific requirements, project complexity, and familiarity with the respective languages.

Advice on ExpressJS and Golang
Needs advice
on
GolangGolangPythonPython
and
React NativeReact Native

I've been juggling with an app idea and am clueless about how to build it.

A little about the app:

  • Social network type app ,
  • Users can create different directories, in those directories post images and/or text that'll be shared on a public dashboard .

Directory creation is the main point of this app. Besides there'll be rooms(groups),chatting system, search operations similar to instagram,push notifications

I have two options:

  1. React Native, Python, AWS stack or
  2. Flutter, Go ( I don't know what stack or tools to use)
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Replies (6)
George Krachtopoulos
Recommends
on
PythonPython

Currently, I have decided to use Python and JavaScript (especially React and Node.js) for any of my projects. Well, I have used Python with Django for a lot of things, and I would certainly recommend Django to anyone, due to its high secure authentication and authorization inbuilt system, a ready to use admin platform, template tags, and many more. Well, I guess that you would like to use Python to create the backend of your application, an API, and React Native for the frontend. Python and JavaScript (React) are on the trend these days and have a huge community, so there are many resources, tutorials, great documentation. I have not really heard anyone using Flutter and Go for applications these days, so I would not recommend it to you, it would make your life much more difficult.

Hope that helps, and good luck with your project!

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Tony Chong
Principal & Founder at Airwave Tech · | 6 upvotes · 369.8K views
Recommends
on
FlutterFlutter

I'm typically agnostic when it comes to picking languages. Whatever gets the job done, but, in this case, to figure out what's involved with what you want to do, it's going to be much more than just picking programming languages for your client and backend interfaces.

So, I'm recommending you use Flutter+Firebase as a way to figure out what you need to get done. It supports both iOS and Android out of the box, introduces you to a bunch of components you will need to think about in the future (whether you stick with Firebase or not), and the key here, is that there are tons of articles, youtube videos, and other courses you can take to pick it up pretty quickly. You could even clone an Instagram knockoff from github. Guess what else, it's all free. You might not need to worry as much about the backend since there are client libraries for Flutter/Dart for Firebase.

Some might have different opinions, and like I said, I'm usually agnostic, but in this case, you have a lot to consider. Where are you going to store the data? Are people going to need to login? Will there but customized settings the will save even if I close the app? Yeah, that's just a few questions.

Those are just a few. Lots to consider, so if you want to get something in your hand as soon as possible, try a search for flutter + firebase + chat + Instagram or something like that and have a look.

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Emmanuel Kayode
Software Engineer at Teamapt Ltd · | 3 upvotes · 366.6K views
Recommends
on
GolangGolang

The above listed tools will do the job, you just need to figure out your architecture(e.g models). How they will all connect. Then you can use a tool you are comfortable with to implement them.

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Recommends
on
React NativeReact Native

If this is for learning about how to design the system, then pick the tools are you are confortable with.

Often times, I get stuck picking the tools (and trying to learn about them) vs actually trying to design the system itself.

If you are familiar with React (check out Expo) and Django then I would recommend going with that.

For deploying your backend, I would go with a provider like https://zeit.co/ that automates a whole bunch of deployment steps with their cli tools that you might have to do with AWS.

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Charles Nelson
Recommends
on
PythonPython

What you need to take a look at is Apache OpenMeetings. It already does what you want, it is open source and well documented and only requires that you design the UI and plumbing required to serve you application.

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Adam Ha
Recommends
on
React NativeReact Native

Let's select right tool you feel you are good at. And selecting tools are used by large community to solve your stuck if encounter

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Needs advice
on
GolangGolangJavaScriptJavaScript
and
PythonPython

We are converting AWS Lambdas from Java due to excessive cold start times. Usage: These lambdas handle XML and JSON payloads, they use s3, API Gateway, RDS, DynamoDB, and external API's. Most of our developers are only experienced in java. These three languages (Go, Node.js, and Python) were discussed, but no consensus has been reached yet.

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Replies (5)
Jordan Gregory
Cloud Operations Manager at Plainsight AI · | 4 upvotes · 420.2K views
Recommends
on
GolangGolang

I've worked with all three of these languages and also with Java developers converting to these languages and far and away Go is the easier one to convert to. With the improved cold-start times and the ease of conversion for a Java developer, it is a no-brainer for me.

The hardest part of the conversion though is going to be the lack of traditional Classes so you have to be mindful of that, but Go Structs and interfaces tend to make up for what is lost there.

Full Disclosure: I'm a 95% Go convert (from Python) at this point in time.

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Ahmet Yildirim
Software Engineering Consultant at UXCraft Sweden AB · | 3 upvotes · 420.3K views
Recommends
on
GolangGolang

Although I am primarily a Javascript developer myself, I used Go to build AWS lambda in a similar scenario to yours. AWS libraries felt better integrated on the Go side, I believe due to the language itself (e.g. how JSON objects are handled in go). Besides that performance of Go is much superior. But on the cons side; community is far smaller around Go, compared to Javascript. That is easy notice if you look at repos of community-maintained libraries for Go. That can feel a bit unreliable.

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Jason Scheirer
Senior Software Engineer at EasyPost · | 2 upvotes · 419.8K views
Recommends
on
GolangGolang

Go would provide the easiest transition for Java programmers -- its IDE/tooling is second to none (just install Goland) and the deploy/distribution story is extremely clean and lends itself to work well in lambda: single, static binaries with quick startup. No need to set up a full environment or package dependencies on your lambda AMIs, just copy a file.

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Paul Whittemore
Developer and Owner at Appurist Software · | 1 upvotes · 419.8K views
Recommends
on
GolangGolang

I was initially going to suggest JavaScript due to the smaller size needs of AWS Lambdas code and the larger range of libraries and community available (and to avoid Python for this). But I have to agree with the recommendations and rationale of @ayildirim above and I think you should choose any reasonable language that is low-overhead, fast startup, and best supported by AWS Lambda, and that is probably Go. I don't think you are likely to go wrong with that, while you can potentially with the others.

So I'd agree, on the strength of AWS Lambda support and the solid performance of Go, it seems like your best choice here for Lambdas (and I'm going to need to consider that myself going forward... pardon the pun).

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Russel Werner
Lead Engineer at StackShare · | 1 upvotes · 419.8K views
Recommends
on
JavaScriptJavaScript
at

If you want to prioritise language familiarity, JavaScript is more like Java than the other choices; and it can be optimised to run very fast. However if you need really fast cold-start times, you can't beat Go since it's compiled. There are other things to consider, such as the massive amount of community packages and help/documentation in the JavaScript ecosystem. Go is newer but seems to be quite popular if you need something that runs fast in a single binary.

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Needs advice
on
GolangGolangNode.jsNode.js
and
ScalaScala

Finding the best server-side tool for building a personal information organizer that focuses on performance, simplicity, and scalability.

performance and scalability get a prototype going fast by keeping codebase simple find hosting that is affordable and scales well (Java/Scala-based ones might not be affordable)

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Replies (1)
David Annez
VP Product at loveholidays · | 5 upvotes · 309K views
Recommends
on
Node.jsNode.js
at

I've picked Node.js here but honestly it's a toss up between that and Go around this. It really depends on your background and skillset around "get something going fast" for one of these languages. Based on not knowing that I've suggested Node because it can be easier to prototype quickly and built right is performant enough. The scaffolding provided around Node.js services (Koa, Restify, NestJS) means you can get up and running pretty easily. It's important to note that the tooling surrounding this is good also, such as tracing, metrics et al (important when you're building production ready services).

You'll get more scalability and perf from go, but balancing them out I would say that you'll get pretty far with a well built Node.JS service (our entire site with over 1.5k requests/m scales easily and holds it's own with 4 pods in production.

Without knowing the scale you are building for and the systems you are using around it it's hard to say for certain this is the right route.

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Decisions about ExpressJS and Golang
William Artero
Senior Platform Engineer at ABN AMRO · | 6 upvotes · 389.6K views

Telegram Messenger has frameworks for most known languages, which makes easier for anyone to integrate with them. I started with Golang and soon found that those frameworks are not up to date, not to mention my experience testing on Golang is also mixed due to how their testing tool works. The natural runner-up was JS, which I'm ditching in favor of TS to make a strongly typed code, proper tests and documentation for broader usage. TypeScript allows fast prototyping and can prevent problems during code phase, given that your IDE of choice has support for a language server, and build phase. Pairing it with lint tools also allows honing code before it even hits the repositories.

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awesomebanana2018

1. Type safety and inferred types

Go is type safe by default, which allows you to right more reliable code and have better developer tooling, plus with the := operator, you can initialize a variable without having to define its type because it automatically gets its type from the initial value.

2. Performance

There isn't much to be said here, but on most counts go beats both Python and Node.js on performance.

3. Documentation

I'm not talking about the Go language itself, although it does have good docs. I'm talking about Go's auto generated documentation tool, which allows people to document their packages easily and works amazingly with Go's type system.

4. Compiles to binary

If you are making a local program for somebody and they don't want to download the Go compiler, you can make Go into a native binary.

5. Built for the web

Go has built in Http libraries to rival Express.js and has a HTML/Text templating system.

6. Great Concurrency

Go utilizes Goroutines to help developers utilize multiple threads easily.

Conclusion

Go is an excellent choice for any system code, especially http networking and web backends.

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Erik Ralston
Chief Architect at LiveTiles · | 14 upvotes · 581.4K views

C# and .Net were obvious choices for us at LiveTiles given our investment in the Microsoft ecosystem. It enabled us to harness of the .Net framework to build ASP.Net MVC, WebAPI, and Serverless applications very easily. Coupled with the high productivity of Visual Studio, it's the native tongue of Microsoft technology.

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Brent Maxwell

Node.js has been growing in popularity, and the ability to access the global pool of Javascript developers is great. There is a decreased amount of effort for people to work across the frontend and backend, and the language itself is easy and works well for many common use cases.

Go was the other serious candidate, but it just hasn't been implemented in as many Production systems yet, and the best Go engineers I've known have been hackers, whereas we're building a robust analytics platform that requires more caution. Type safety is easily added with TypeScript, and NPM is awesomely handy.

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Chose
GolangGolang
over
JavaJava

When developing a new blockchain, we as a team chose Go lang over Java and other candidates, due to Go being (a) natively suited to concurrency - there are primitives in the language itself (goroutines, channels) that really help with reasoning about concurrency (b) super fast - build time, running, testing are all much faster that Java, this gives a far superior developer experience (c) shorter and stricter than Java - code is much shorter (less verbose), and there is usually one good way to do things, and even the code formatter that is bundled with Go is very opinionated - over a short time this makes reading other people's code far smoother than having to deal with different styles.

You should be aware that Go presently (v1.13) lacks Generics.

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Roman Glushko
Machine Learning, Software Engineering and Life · | 3 upvotes · 365.5K views

I chose Golang as a language to write Tango because it's super easy to get started with. I also considered Rust, but learning curve of it is much higher than in Golang. I felt like I would need to spend an endless amount of time to even get the hello world app working in Rust. While easy to learn, Golang still shows good performance, multithreading out of the box and fun to implement.

I also could choose PHP and create a phar-based tool, but I was not sure that it would be a good choice as I want to scale to be able to process Gbs of access log data

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Ítalo Vietro
VP Platform Engineering at UrbanSportsClub · | 7 upvotes · 243.1K views

We decided to use python to write our ETLs and import them into metabase via a lambda. Before python we tried using Go, but overall go was way more verbose than Python when writing the ETLs. Go also had some issues managing memory when using the S3 upload manager library. This was a deal breaker for us that made us switch to Python.

In the end the solution was much cleaner and maintainable.

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This language, even in early dev stages is to put it simply, fantastic! It is small, fast, and types a lot like go. It feels complete even though coming out less than a year ago in first early stages. I love it, it works anywhere and everywhere plus making binaries and GUI applications is just super easy!

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Jordan Gregory
Cloud Operations Manager at Plainsight AI · | 3 upvotes · 156.7K views
Migrated
from
PythonPython
to
GolangGolang

A number of years ago; I had done python for a long time prior to learning about Go. Most of what I wrote was system-like things and web-things in python, and I got tired of running into the lack-of-a-type-system problems that python gave me. I wanted to switch to a compiled, strongly-typed system that wasn't C/C++ (been there, done that, got the "shoot yourself in the foot" t-shirt). I looked into both Rust/Go, and for what I wanted to do (system/web) stuff ... at the time, Go was the strongest candidate, so I switched and never went back. Recently I started to re-look at Rust for system things, but for anything I do that I have to touch the web with, it will be Go from now on.

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Russtopia Labs
Sr. Doodad Imagineer at Russtopia Labs · | 0 upvote · 214.7K views

As a personal research project I wanted to add post-quantum crypto KEM (key encapsulation) algorithms and new symmetric crypto session algorithms to openssh. I found the openssh code and its channel/context management extremely complex.

Concurrently, I was learning Go. It occurred to me that Go's excellent standard library, including crypto libraries, plus its much safer memory model and string/buffer handling would be better suited to a secure remote shell solution. So I started from scratch, writing a clean-room Go-based solution, without regard for ssh compatibility. Interactive and token-based login, secure copy and tunnels.

Of course, it needs a proper security audit for side channel attacks, protocol vulnerabilities and so on -- but I was impressed by how much simpler a client-server application with crypto and complex terminal handling was in Go.

$ sloc openssh-portable 
  Languages  Files    Code  Comment  Blank   Total  CodeLns
      Total    502  112982    14327  15705  143014   100.0%
          C    389  105938    13349  14416  133703    93.5%
      Shell     92    6118      937   1129    8184     5.7%
       Make     16     468       37    131     636     0.4%
        AWK      1     363        0      7     370     0.3%
        C++      3      79        4     18     101     0.1%
       Conf      1      16        0      4      20     0.0%
$ sloc xs
  Languages  Files  Code  Comment  Blank  Total  CodeLns
      Total     34  3658     1231    655   5544   100.0%
         Go     19  3230     1199    507   4936    89.0%
   Markdown      2   181        0     76    257     4.6%
       Make      7   148        4     50    202     3.6%
       YAML      1    39        0      5     44     0.8%
       Text      1    30        0      7     37     0.7%
     Modula      1    16        0      2     18     0.3%
      Shell      3    14       28      8     50     0.9%

https://gogs.blitter.com/RLabs/xs

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Pros of ExpressJS
Pros of Golang
  • 381
    Simple
  • 336
    Node.js
  • 244
    Javascript
  • 193
    High performance
  • 152
    Robust routing
  • 73
    Middlewares
  • 72
    Open source
  • 59
    Great community
  • 37
    Hybrid web applications
  • 16
    Well documented
  • 9
    Sinatra inspired
  • 9
    Rapid development
  • 7
    Isomorphic js.. superfast and easy
  • 7
    Socket connection
  • 5
    Light weight
  • 4
    Npm
  • 4
    Resource available for learning
  • 3
    Callbacks
  • 3
    Event loop
  • 2
    Data stream
  • 1
    Easy to use
  • 551
    High-performance
  • 395
    Simple, minimal syntax
  • 363
    Fun to write
  • 303
    Easy concurrency support via goroutines
  • 273
    Fast compilation times
  • 195
    Goroutines
  • 181
    Statically linked binaries that are simple to deploy
  • 151
    Simple compile build/run procedures
  • 137
    Great community
  • 137
    Backed by google
  • 53
    Garbage collection built-in
  • 47
    Built-in Testing
  • 44
    Excellent tools - gofmt, godoc etc
  • 40
    Elegant and concise like Python, fast like C
  • 37
    Awesome to Develop
  • 26
    Used for Docker
  • 26
    Flexible interface system
  • 25
    Great concurrency pattern
  • 24
    Deploy as executable
  • 21
    Open-source Integration
  • 19
    Easy to read
  • 17
    Fun to write and so many feature out of the box
  • 17
    Go is God
  • 14
    Powerful and simple
  • 14
    Easy to deploy
  • 14
    Its Simple and Heavy duty
  • 14
    Concurrency
  • 13
    Best language for concurrency
  • 11
    Safe GOTOs
  • 11
    Rich standard library
  • 10
    Clean code, high performance
  • 10
    Easy setup
  • 10
    High performance
  • 9
    Simplicity, Concurrency, Performance
  • 8
    Cross compiling
  • 8
    Single binary avoids library dependency issues
  • 8
    Hassle free deployment
  • 7
    Used by Giants of the industry
  • 7
    Simple, powerful, and great performance
  • 7
    Gofmt
  • 6
    Garbage Collection
  • 5
    WYSIWYG
  • 5
    Very sophisticated syntax
  • 5
    Excellent tooling
  • 4
    Keep it simple and stupid
  • 4
    Widely used
  • 4
    Kubernetes written on Go
  • 2
    No generics
  • 1
    Looks not fancy, but promoting pragmatic idioms
  • 1
    Operator goto

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Cons of ExpressJS
Cons of Golang
  • 27
    Not python
  • 17
    Overrated
  • 14
    No multithreading
  • 9
    Javascript
  • 5
    Not fast
  • 3
    Easily Insecure for Novices
  • 42
    You waste time in plumbing code catching errors
  • 25
    Verbose
  • 23
    Packages and their path dependencies are braindead
  • 16
    Google's documentations aren't beginer friendly
  • 15
    Dependency management when working on multiple projects
  • 10
    Automatic garbage collection overheads
  • 8
    Uncommon syntax
  • 7
    Type system is lacking (no generics, etc)
  • 5
    Collection framework is lacking (list, set, map)
  • 3
    Best programming language
  • 1
    A failed experiment to combine c and python

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What is ExpressJS?

Express is a minimal and flexible node.js web application framework, providing a robust set of features for building single and multi-page, and hybrid web applications.

What is Golang?

Go is expressive, concise, clean, and efficient. Its concurrency mechanisms make it easy to write programs that get the most out of multicore and networked machines, while its novel type system enables flexible and modular program construction. Go compiles quickly to machine code yet has the convenience of garbage collection and the power of run-time reflection. It's a fast, statically typed, compiled language that feels like a dynamically typed, interpreted language.

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What are some alternatives to ExpressJS and Golang?
Koa
Koa aims to be a smaller, more expressive, and more robust foundation for web applications and APIs. Through leveraging generators Koa allows you to ditch callbacks and greatly increase error-handling. Koa does not bundle any middleware.
React
Lots of people use React as the V in MVC. Since React makes no assumptions about the rest of your technology stack, it's easy to try it out on a small feature in an existing project.
Flask
Flask is intended for getting started very quickly and was developed with best intentions in mind.
Django
Django is a high-level Python Web framework that encourages rapid development and clean, pragmatic design.
NGINX
nginx [engine x] is an HTTP and reverse proxy server, as well as a mail proxy server, written by Igor Sysoev. According to Netcraft nginx served or proxied 30.46% of the top million busiest sites in Jan 2018.
See all alternatives