[jerf]

"Start up a whole async event loop" is really just "call one of the event loop APIs in the kernel". It's not like "starting an event loop" is intrinsically costing a millisecond and half a gig of RAM or something.

What a larger system builds around the event loop may be heavyweight, but I think that would generally be less about "using Node" or "using Go" and more about picking up some heavyweight framework within the event-looping language. The event loop itself is generally going to be too light-weight to worry about compared to the things it is waiting on to worry about, until you get to a scale that you're unlikely to reach on a CLI.