Developer experience: 3 reasons NodeJS developers should learn Go in 2023

In 2021 I decided to learn Go to use in my projects over Node.js.

In the years since, I’ve not had much desire to go back to using JavaScript. Most articles comparing the two languages will focus heavily on language features like strong typing and concurrency. However, some of my favorite features actually focus on developer experience!

Here are three reasons you should consider learning Go:

1. Code formatting - The tooling that accompanies Go enforces all code to be written in a consistent way, meaning that having to read other developers’ code will be much simpler!

2. Package management - Instead of relying on third-party services like NPM to host packages, you can simply run go get followed by a public repository name to grab it right from the repo.

3. Cross-platform executables - While Node.js is cross-platform, it generally requires the Node runtime installed on the target machine. Go can build artifacts into native code for all operating systems, meaning they can be run without having Go installed!