V8 is not dirt slow. You may dismiss benchmarks where Node looks good as "invented" but there are countless real world examples of people moving from other lang

V8 is not dirt slow. You may dismiss benchmarks where Node looks good as "invented" but there are countless real world examples of people moving from other languages to node and experiencing a huge speed increase. I know of one startup that had a fortune 500 company sign up to their service and their dotnet APIs couldn't hold the load and the cost of scaling them wasn't sustainable. They rewrote the hardest hit APIs in node over a weekend and were shocked at the improvements. I also know another startup that had a similar experience, they moved off of Ruby to node and were shocked at the speed increase that they were getting. They couldn't be competitive with their competition with their old codebase. Despite what I just said above speed isn't necessarily the most important factor. Infrastructure is cheap and developers are expensive. If I'm asked what the best programing language or platform is my answer is usually the language and platform that your team is most productive with. Only a few companies get successful enough that speed is the deciding factor in platform choice, if we say that productivity is the most important factor then the JS/Node combination is right up there as one of the more understood and productive systems.