Is Go still the right choice for backend development in 2025 or has its concurrency model become a performance liability? Alex and Brian from Speedify break down the real-world engineering tradeoffs between Go, Rust, Node.js, and C++. They dive into Golang’s goroutines, mutex locking, race conditions, and synchronization overhead, explaining how these issues surfaced at scale inside Speedify’s infrastructure. Using Docker as a case study, they describe how container startup times ballooned from ~80 ms to over a second as Go-based components accumulated locking, cleanup inconsistencies, and goroutine leaks.

Go started at Google with Ken Thompson and Rob Pike. Golang quickly became popular for microservices and cloud-native tooling, powering Docker, Traefik, Caddy, but thousands of goroutines touching shared state can create unpredictable performance under load. Alex and Brian outline Speedify’s backend stack: Node.js/TypeScript for server-side apps, high-performance C++ daemons for packet processing, and Rust modules for memory-safe dataflow.