Primary author of node-postgres (both the JavaScript & libpq versions) here. Very good question. I'd say part of the relative speed is because it's been a mostly 1 person (me!) project for a loooong time & I haven't had a lot of time to do perf analysis to find where exactly to make it faster. I would absolutely love some help! My time for open source is pretty limited, and I try to spend most of it focused on triaging issues. If you'd like to help out please don't hesitate to open an issue, a pull request, or send me a gchat (contact info is in node-postgres readme) and we can discuss!