You can get the best of both worlds: a synchronous programming model combined with the low memory memory usage of Node by using fibers. The trust issues relatin

You can get the best of both worlds: a synchronous programming model combined with the low memory memory usage of Node by using fibers. The trust issues relating to cooperative multitasking that you mention are still valid, but I haven't run into these problems in practice. There are some benchmarks in the README to Common Node, a library that I wrote that makes using fibers easier: https://github.com/olegp/common-node#readme https://github.com/olegp/common-node#readme Lazy loading becomes very straightforward and something I do fairly often when using e.g. https://github.com/olegp/mongo-sync https://github.com/olegp/mongo-sync