Yes, you're mostly right, but with an important nuance.
For a simple database fetch:
The database usually determines most of the latency (query execution, indexes, disk I/O, caching).
Network latency and connection pooling also play a significant role.
The application server (Node.js, Go, Rust) is often just waiting for the database to respond.
Node.js's event loop is very efficient at handling thousands of concurrent I/O operations because it doesn't block while waiting for the database. Go achieves similar scalability using goroutines, and Rust does so with async runtimes like Tokio. For I/O-bound workloads, all three can achieve excellent performance.
Where Go and Rust have advantages is when:
The application performs significant CPU-intensive work (image processing, encryption, compression, AI inference, large JSON transformations, etc.).
You need extremely high concurrency with lower memory overhead (Go's goroutines are very lightweight, and Rust has zero-cost abstractions and no garbage collector).
You want more predictable latency under very heavy load.
So if your superior said:
"Move to Go or Rust because database fetching will be faster simply because they are
