both are not comparable Nodejs is a runtime and Laravel is a framework. You might compare sailsjs vs laravel but not nodejs vs laravel

what are the tricks squeeze the bundle size of a reactjs app or any frontend app? Another question, is there a package to highlight or remove dead/unused javascript functions?

look, you can build micro services with any language you're good at. No need to change your tech stack until there's a real technical reason for it.

Babel is most famous for such thing

I used to do it in PHP and in javascript too. It's very common in javascript as you do not have the "private" keyword

The first solution comes in mind when it comes to chat is "sockets". The easiest way to do so is using a read made service called "pusher" https://pusher.com/ you'll have a channel for each conversation and all the user who are interested to chat to gether will listen to that channel. You'll have multiple events and all the users will subscribe to those events. For example: user1, user2 and user 3 wants to chat together. You'll have a channel for example called "chat1" Then user1, user2 and user3 will need to listen to this channel. Then you'll have for example an event called "new_msg" all the users will subscribe to this event. when any new message is being sent this "new_msg" event will be fired to all the subscribed users will be notified and see that message.

If you consider reactjs+redux+react router then yes they're comparable to angular. For example I was working on a project that required to creat a widget that will be integrated with other websites. I did go for react and did not think about angular. I was pretty fun to implement it via react (except for the server communication part, I missed angular's $.http :/ )

@Michael you might be right. Actually both of us are right in different variations :D

Angular and react are not comparable. Each has its own cases that it was built for. React was built to deal with DOM and UI elements. Angular was built for building full web app.