Why and why not Node.js

Why Node.js 

Why Node.js?

Let's start by taking a look at why Node.js is one of the fastest growing web platforms out there.

Node.js provides you with the following benefits:

• Develop faster due to the vast number of modules and reusable code from npm
• Make fewer mistakes and be more productive (One language across the stack)
• Delight your user with fast response time (YMMV)
• Reduce team size and communication overhead (full stack JavaScript)
• Reduce dependency on other teams (e.g., backend API teams)
• Ability to re-use code on the browser and server

Node.js Features

Node.js has some distinct features. Here are some examples of those features:

• Non-blocking I/O: performant
• Fast JS engine: browser arms race (Google Chrome V8 and Microsoft Chakra)
• Expressive and interpreted language: don't waste time on setup
• Solid and improving language standard (ECMAScript)
• Built in package manager with a humongous number of packages (npm)

Why not Node.js

Node Downsides

Node isn't always the best design choice. Like most things in life, Node.js has some downsides. Node might not be a good fit because of the following reasons:

• Memory leaks in long running processes with Node are worse than in short running browser environments such as browser JavaScript
• The event loop makes asynchronous error handling more difficult than synchronous error handling
• No benefit for CPU-bound tasks
• Need to think about scalability early on to develop stateless scalable distributed systems
• No built-in typing (but possible with TypeScript)

Note: The Event loop is the core of Node.js and it's a genius idea. However, don't use Node.js for blocking, CPU-intensive tasks. Node.js will not give you a performance boost for stuff like that. Node.js is best suited for I/O stuff (like web servers).