I think it’s the event loop model reuses more per connection. He mentions nothing is stopping you from implementing an event loop model for the pub-sub in go, just there wasn’t any library support and he didn’t want to spend time building it out when it is the default model in Node.

There was an event loop implemented in Go on HN a few weeks/months ago that people might find interesting: https://github.com/tidwall/evio

On a side note, tidwall (Josh) is one of the primary reasons why I want to give Go a go. I love https://github.com/tidwall/tile38.

It's a bad comparison, cause the Go version is using a "db" (key/value store) that tends to use quite a bit of memory.