Developing and Benchmarking the Same Feature in Node and Go

When I started building chaos-proxy, the initial goal was simple: make API chaos testing practical for JavaScript and TypeScript teams. I wanted something that could sit between an app and its upstream API and introduce realistic turbulence on demand: latency spikes, intermittent failures, and other behavior that makes integration tests feel closer to production. Node.js was the obvious first runtime for that because the ecosystem, tooling, and middleware ergonomics are excellent for rapid iteration. It is hard to overstate how productive that setup is when the main audience is already living in npm, TypeScript, and JavaScript test runners. Later, I rewrote the same proxy in Go to push raw proxy performance further and support higher throughput under load. The intent was not to replace one with the other philosophically, but to explore a different optimization frontier with the same product idea. This post documents what happened when I implemented the same non-trivial feature in both