Node js vs Python: Which is the Best Technology to Choose?

Node and Python are popular programming languages. However, people often get confused when choosing a career. Both languages have a strong community support and strong package ecosystems. Then also, they are different when it is about to use them. Here in this article we will cover the Node js vs Python based information.

Key difference:

  • Node is good for website development and web applications. Python is best suitable for numerical computations, backend applications and machine learning.
  • Nodejs uses a JavaScript interpreter, but Python uses CPython for the same purpose.
  • Nodejs is good for asynchronous programming, but Python is not a choice for the same purpose.
  • Node.js is good for small projects, whereas Python is good for developing large scale projects.
Key factors of differences in node and python

What is Node.js?

Node.js is an asynchronous JavaScript runtime, and it runs on Google’s V8 engine. The main purpose of node.js is to build desktop mobile applications. Node.js support the following paradigms:

  • Imperative
  • Event driven
  • Object oriented
  • Functional programming

When to use Node.js?

Node.js is built on Chrome’s JavaScript runtime. It is useful for building scalable network apps. It is beneficial when developing eCommerce sites and heavy load apps.

What is Python?

Python is a general-purpose programming language which is used for backend development, machine learning and other data science. It supports for the following paradigms:

  • Object oriented
  • Functional programming
  • Procedural

When to use Python?

There are many introductory resources present in Python. That’s why it is a good accessible language for programmers who are freshers. You can consider Python for big data solutions, scientific apps and other projects.

Node js vs Python: Key Features to Compare:

Comparing Architecture

Node.js

Node.js is a single-threaded and non-blocking one, and it implements an event-driven architecture. There is a single thread in which the entire codes and libraries execute. Node.js also use callbacks to signal the completion of long-running tasks.

Node.js use call

Use of Node.js is in the following factors.

  • I/O operations: Due to event-driven architecture and non-blocking
  • Real-time apps: Using the socket.io library
  • CPU bound operations: Due to a good multi-threading supporting feature

Python

Python is used for the following machine learning, data analysis and others.

  • SciPy
  • NumPy
  • Matplotlib

A python is an excellent option for data analysis and scientific tools. This is the major difference in terms of architecture if you consider python vs node js.

Community and Libraries:

Community role is very important in any software development cycle. A large community based programming language has the following benefits.

  • More learning content
  • More tools and libraries for development
  • Easy to find the support
  • Easy to hire the developers

Node.js:

Node.js has a good community that has built over one million open-source packages. These are available to you on npm.

Following are some packages:

  • Axios is for making API requests
  • Lodash is a utility library
  • Express is a web framework for web applications development

Python:

The python community has over 370K packages and 3.4 million. They are released on the Python Package Index. You can use pip to easily download them to your project. From the Python package index, the package installer pulls packages using pip.

Popular packages:

  • Pandas are used for the analyzing data
  • Django is for a web framework
  • NumPy is a library for working with arrays
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Parallelism and concurrency:

First of all we understand concurrency and parallelism. Concurrency occurs when two more than two tasks execute in the multiple threads at different times.

Parallelism is defined as the process of multiple tasks executed in the different threads simultaneously.

When the application tasks are CPU bound the parallelism and concurrency are invaluable.

  • Encryption
  • Processing images
  • Video compression
  • Doing complex calculations

Node js:

Using the worker_threads module you can write multi-threaded programs in node.js. You can execute CPU-intensive JavaScript code in parallel through the lightweight thread workers.

The worker threads process ID as the main thread and share the same memory. The communication among threads takes place through message passing.

Python:

Using the threading module you can achieve concurrency. It creates threads to execute parts of the code. Here threads will not execute in the parallel process. Here is the role of GIL that ensures that only one thread can execute Python code.

Concurrency, on the other hand, is helpful to I/O bound tasks. The CPU-bound tasks also benefit from parallelism.

Tabular form of Node js vs Python:

Should I Learn Node js or Python?

Node js vs Python is an endless topic. Both programming languages are valuable at their place. You must go with Node.js if your focus is on website development and web application development. If you like to do multiple things like numerical computation, network programming and machine learning then Python is an ideal choice.

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