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by ZhongXina 701 days ago
Better for what? Quickly churning out short-lived code to get the next round of funding, definitely. Writing (and _supporting_) "serious" projects over the long term, which also require high performance and/or high scalability, and can rip through terabytes of data if needed, definitely not. (All IMHO from lots of personal experience.)
2 comments

It's good for things that don't involve ripping through terabytes of data, which is actually a lot of things. And idk if I'd use Java for that either.
I'm actually in this exact position right now. The vast majority of the time I write in TS but I have a need to process a whole lot of data so I went for Rust instead. Java is too much of a headache for me, personally
Yeah, Rust is fast, or you can go the other extreme with Python if you can put the heavy lifting on native modules.
Depends on your architecture. For scaling out rather than up, node and python are both far more performant because the footprint of minimum viable environment is much smaller. When you need to serve anywhere from 10-200,000 requests a minute on the same system quickly, and efficiently, lambda/azure functions/google app engine backed by node or python is pretty ideal.

As an example, when my org needs to contact folks about potential mass shooter events, our SLA is 90 seconds. If we did it in cloud with java or .net, it'd be too slow to spin up. If we did it on prem, we'd be charged insane amounts just for the ability to instantly respond to low frequency black swan events, or it'd be too slow. This is a real story of how a Java dev team transitioned to using node for scale in the first place.

Unlike Spring, JIT-based ASP.NET Core deployments spin up very fast (<2-5s for even large-ish applications, the main bottleneck is how fast it can open connections to dependencies, load configuration, etc.). For AOT variant, the startup time is usually below 200ms if we don't count the slowness of surrounding infra which applies to any language.

Of course CPU and RAM per request when compared to Node.js are not even close as Node is easily slower by a factor of 2-10.