Goravel: A Go framework inspired by Laravel(goravel.dev) |
Goravel: A Go framework inspired by Laravel(goravel.dev) |
Then I discovered Go and learned a different way to make systems. At first it was strange - where was the IoC framework? How do I build up my db entities?
And then I got into the philosophy of Go: how its better to make things that are clear rather than clever, and how its better to do things with an obvious control flow. In my current Go job, we wire singletons manually, build up our http server manually, and write raw SQL. It works gangbusters.
Please lets keep Go raw and simple.
What happens with the "I'll build everything from scratch" apps is they are oftentimes not easy to understand, different patterns end up being used, 3rd party packages get slapped on ad-hoc and over time it just becomes a frankenstein. Much better to start with a hard set of rails that follow a set of conventions you just have to learn once.
The whole "I can move faster" without a framework is just an illusion that appears at the beginning of building an app. It will quickly disappear as more devs and complex code features are requested.
Without Spring, you would have every team rebuilding the database layer in 100 different ways. With 100 shoddy attempts at documentation.
So for better or worse, having one framework-standard way to interact with the database, modify headers, or do any number of standard tasks makes life easier even if it enshrouds the underlying system in abstraction and layering.
I have to say it's not something I've experienced in practice, mainly because the teams I'm on take such things seriously, but YMMV.
In enterprise you have template repos and engineering fora where teams standardise-ish how things are done. This converges on the standard patterns, Spring, Micronaut etc.
Usually, you can deviate from these patterns at team discretion but you'll get questions from EMs and frowns from devs who roll on / off your project.
Tbh, its not a whole lot different than where PHP is going where php is becoming synonymous with Laravel. Wordpress is probably one of the last few bastions keeping that framework from fully owning the language.
https://blog.laughingman.dev/article/Building_a_simple_demo_...
One of the things I would discard would be the use of an ORM library : every library adds another level of complexity and doesn't allow to see what is happening when the SQL statements are built. In my opinion, it is better to create some simple methods for each object that implement the CRUD operations and build the SQL statements directly.
It is possible to write a web application with GO using only some libraries, for example for routing and authentication.
My favorite place to start is Autostrada : https://autostrada.dev/
> simplifying the learning curve for Y language developers
You'll just end up writing the same old patterns in the new language as you did in the old one.
Especially with Go, it's really easier to adopt the existing tooling (most of which is in the standard lib) than to port whatever concepts Laravel/PHP had.
But... Yeah: I prefer "Gravel", too. Is there another project out there with that name?
/English nerd
Link: https://loco.rs/
As someone who loves both Laravel and Go, this is a Godsend! I would get back to Go only for using this!
That said you can choose to go your completely own way and ignore the Laravel way. But good luck with hiring.
I think Laravel is the best framework for getting an idea going, to MVP to MMP to scale. It just works.
Purists hate it because it is PHP and they still think it is 1999. They also hate that there is the “Laravel way”, even though you can completely ignore it.
Laravel is what the non-cool kids use to ship.
It's not about me not willing to use Google but about not having me to. I expect to find all relevant information on the website in an easy to find manner.
Given the standard batteries included in Go, I think there is even less chess for this to succeed.
But still that is a good thing to try. Why not. All the best.
Please add inertia. It will make it extremely productive!
I keep having mix feelings when having this dichotomy
Why can't you do that with anything?
Have you done this for any complex system? I'd love to see you do this for the AzerothCore: it has 298 tables, 3,010,875 rows across those tables, and one table (quest_template) has 105 columns.
Instead I've thrown SQLAlchemy in front of it and now I can query it without writing a single line of SQL.
I think tools are tools, and using the right tool at the right time is an important skill I think you've yet to develop.
1. you have no control over the generated SQL and because it has to be generic and db agnostic, might not be the best option depending on the database you are currently using
2. when something doesn't work as expected, and it happens, they are difficult to debug (too many layers) and find the issue
3. they are extremely inefficient, because they have to dynamically build every time the code is run the corresponding SQL code : I'm sure most would implement some caching mechanism to prevent this , but in any case it's a waste of resources.
This is just anecdotal, but I remember trying SQLAlchemy many years ago for a small Python program I was writing for a RaspberryPi 3 : it was extremely slow. So, I removed the library and used instead the native database binding for MariaDB instead, and the speed improved a lot.
For PHP, the situation is the worst because there is no application server (they exist, but not very widely used), but the code is regenerated every time. This is the main problem in any large PHP project, such as Nextcloud. If they would adopt FrankenPHP or RoadRunner, they could improve the performance of the applications a lot.
Laravel is great, but that because they have nicely designed escape hatches and their architecture is very modular.
You are correct that "using the right tool at the right time" is important, and often, that right tool is SQL. Other times it's not. Unfortunately there are many developers who don't really know SQL, so every problem is ORM-shaped.
We've taken over a rails codebase at work, and the number of O(n) queries that are being done instead of bulk queries is rather shocking. I'm sure that one can write efficient queries using the Rails ORM, but it does seem to me that the presence of it allows for more misuse.
Additionally, Laravel ships with a huge swath of functionality out of the box. While you’re still researching the best SQL library for a project, a Laravel developer has spun up the framework with a working Postgres connection and starts being productive. There is no value in inspecting the SQL underneath, because the queries never get complex enough to warrant that. And if they do, you drop out of the ORM and write SQL.
As I said before: this isn’t the best way to do something, but a very peculiar way that works well for a specific kind of application. Go is simply a tool for other kinds of applications, where Laravel cannot compete.
People do this? In every language I've worked with, there's practically just one SQL library to use. And you just write a query, execute it, and map some results. Very basic.
It's nice but they could make it even nicer by adding succint descriptions and/or pros and cons to alternatives. Choosing a database probably needs no explaining, but choosing a http router is different.
Also "Read configuration settings from env vars or command line switches". Both. Both is good.
Perhaps something like https://github.com/sqlc-dev/sqlc ?
Didnt' now about sqlc, it seems very interesting ! Thanks for sharing !
These also have the advantage of being programming language-agnostic.
Sometimes it is better to use 'explain plan' once rather than cleaning up a generated sql filled with outer joins, table scans, and difficult to understand variable names.
The ORM code in this case can look more "pristine" but can cause the app to fail in production. If you are using createNativeQuery everywhere, what is the point of an ORM?
> Why not use the actual language or framework your engineers like instead?
Go does not provide "enough" by itself to completely furnish my needs. And having a framework that uses common terminology and patterns allows you to get s__t done and not waste time bikeshedding.
"Microservices are cattle, not pets."
No framework needed.
Consistency and predictability, but with a more convenient technology underneath.
I don't want to mess around with JDK runtimes or .NET. I don't want to experiment with various static packaging techniques and wonder whether any sort of reflection will be incompatible with that or any of the large frameworks that pre-date it will work. The runtimes themselves are good, but that's just busywork.
At the same time, I do want the ability to pick up a project made with a certain framework and approximately know how things work and how to do stuff. Less undocumented internal utilities and custom libraries, more of something predictable - controllers here, services there, repositories over here, here's how the ORM works that's tightly integrated with everything else, here's how you make a RESTful API. Think more like Angular than React to use a good front end example (e.g. a pre-packaged setup with batteries included). Or, you know, a direct comparison between the likes of Ruby on Rails, Laravel, Django, Spring Boot, ASP.NET etc., maybe not verbatim, but something consistent and close enough.
Go's standard library is also pretty good and includes a lot of stuff. The IDE experience is good (no need to even think that much about configuring your own code formatting), the compiler is good, platform support is good, runtime performance is good while the language remains higher level and easier than the likes of Rust, it's not hard to get everything into a single self-contained executable. There's numerous projects that have sprung up around that, even something like K3s (full Kubernetes distribtion) can be downloaded as a single file. Also really good for just CLI utilities, or full blown desktop apps (e.g. with Wails).
In other words, to take the technological advancements, shed the legacy cruft and still be able to have many projects be predictable and keep the productivity high, regardless of whether the greater language community is more interested in a grab bag of more self-contained libraries.
I personally believe that it is a much better language and ecosystem, and wouldn't bother using Go which has way more boilerplate, has pretty bad expressivity (so that libraries/frameworks will suffer from a usability perspective, e.g. look at JOOQs, a completely type-safe SQL query builder) for negligible benefits.
Python has Django
Java has Spring (among others)
C# has asp.net
Ruby has Rails
PHP has Laravel
What does Go have?
Big frameworks are extremely limiting. They also make escape harder when you realize how limiting they are.
I tried to like various frameworks during my time as a Java developer, but they always end up costing projects more than what they save. In terms of time, clarity, performance, adaptability and maintainability. Decades ago I too used to think they might help, but I was never able to observe any real positive effects over time.
You can always do better when you start with the domain you are solving and work from there rather than trying to adapt your domain to some generic solution.
The reason Go feels more productive than Java is because in Go the community seems to understand this fairly well. So the whole ecosystem is built around libraries that are easy to compose rather than frameworks that try to coerce you.
Big frameworks are not really helpful. At best, they are occasionally fashionable, which tricks people into thinking they are better off solving problems the wrong way around.
It was literally designed to do away with this choice confusion and provide one path to servicedom.
It’s honestly feature rich enough to do most things that the only other dependencies we really need to pull in is some third-party SDKs (e.g. AWS) and our database driver.
I think that maybe you shouldn't want that. Go is a simple language with a very extensive standard library. It's quite easy to do most things you would want by just writing some code, leveraging the standard library, and maybe including a handful of external libraries. Frameworks are not needed and will eventually just get in the way.
TypeScript has NestJS (among others)
Elixir has Phoenix
Go is indeed easy to get started with, but it's different when dealing with server-side rendering and not a single-page application where Go is a backend.
There are some ways around this these days, but these seem unlikely to bolt in to common shared hosting providers.
This. In my experience, every project that has non-trivial query requirements starts out as "this ORM is nice, it takes away 90% of my work" and ends with "how do I get rid of that leaky abstraction layer that constantly makes my life harder."
Depending on the tech in use, there's usually some sort of an escape hatch, such as writing your own native SQL queries that take advantage of the exact functionality you need, while letting you keep the 90% of the rest CRUD based on the automatically generated stuff.
Plus, nothing is preventing you from putting complex querying in a DB view and then have a read only mapping for the ORM against that, giving you the best of both worlds - using the DB for what it's good at, keeping things relatively simple and yet powerful on the app side.
You manage (as few as possible) connections to a DBMS, create prepared statements, cache and transform results, lazily iterate over large result sets, batch writes, manage schema migrations, and more. It’s not very basic, unless you’re cobbling up a prototype.
> In every language I've worked with, there's practically just one SQL library to use.
Curious which languages that were. In practically all ecosystems I know, there are 2-4 contenders.
It would be helpful to explain a little bit about why they like Laravel though, to entice you to read more by yourself.
But they use the term "Laravel inspired" which can be understood as well as them catering also to regular Go users without prior Laravel experience. If that is the case, it might be worth to explain the features and usage of their product.
I assure you React gets plenty of hate from the JavaScript community - enough to spawn over a dozen competitors. At some point, community love/hate is irrelevant.
OK, I want a similar thing to ActiveRecord - with all the features, is that quite simple to build?
Now you'll tell me I probably don't want an ORM at all. But lets say I do, lets say many people find value in these things.
First of all, you shouldn't be using Go, because it's not the language where you do those kinds of things.
Doing things the hard way was the norm until a better way was found.
Saying something was the norm in the past doesn't imply it was good
People also "used to" invest radioactive water and used radioactive cremes and toothpastes for health benefits in the 20's and 30's. So what's your point?
Moreover, any exaggerated example of a bygone time is unrelated, as many SQL-driven systems still exist today. I work on one such system which is much larger than the example given, and not long ago, I increased performance of some ActiveRecord queries 1000x by simply rewriting them in SQL. (No hate against ActiveRecord, I use it regularly. It just takes a lot of discipline once you hit queries of a certain complexity.)
But it was ActiveRecord that got you there in the first place, as a business, and enabled you to even build anything quickly enough to meet market demand and therefore make money. Moving to a few raw SQL statements today to improve performance is called optimising and everyone in every industry does that... _after the fact_. No one should be (pre-)optimising from day 1. That's a good place to start with an ORM.
Our industry is about balancing engineering knowledge with business knowledge and market forces: we have to accept that we can't write perfect code today otherwise you won't have a job tomorrow. You have to get up and running now and optimise later, which might look like replacing some parts of an ORM's job with an optimised SQL statement.
(And again: no ORM is stopping you from running raw SQL. You can have both. It's foolish to throw out an entire ORM and everything it gives you because, "Remember when I optimised that one statement that one time?")
ActiveRecord is the problem there, though. Or any active record-style ORM. That's why Hybernate/SQLAlchemy-style ORMs are so useful: they don't suffer from the same issues as ActiveRecord-style ORMs.
To ease the burden, I introduced Alpine.js, which helped, but the real challenge was juggling Go and TypeScript for different parts of the stack. When the team decided to revamp the site with a new Figma design, I switched to Astro after the release of Astro 2.0—it simplified frontend development and allowed me to gradually move away from Go. This wasn’t just about adopting a new language with old patterns; it was about making my workload sustainable while improving maintainability.
A month later (after three years), bad news—they ran out of funding and had no time for marketing. On top of that, I have vision problems (genetic and post-cataract surgery), making job options limited. But one thing I’ve gained from this experience is a strong grasp of frontend performance optimisation—JavaScript, Tailwind CSS, HTML, and responsive images. There are millions of poorly optimised websites that Astro could improve. At least in Singapore, where we have great internet connectivity, I can keep refining my skills.
Astro solved:
- Same codebase: Both frontend and backend with TypeScript, meaning I no longer have to write routers whenever we add a new category.
- Optimisations: Reducing JavaScript and loading JavaScript as a module for better security.
- Maintainability: Go HTML templating was harder to maintain; I prefer Astro’s JSX-like syntax.
- Performance: If I need performance, Bun can be as performant as Go, which is a bonus.
- Reusability: Lots of UI and Astro components can be reuse.
- Productive (Future): I’m waiting for Vite (Rolldown) to speed up my build times. Evan You has lots of ideas for Rolldown plugins.
- Community: Of course, an active community that is improving Astro so we don’t have to reinvent the wheel, with lots of sensible features by default, including Starlight for docs. I proposed to the Echo maintainer to adopt it over Docusaurus, but I was turned down.
When you have Go, I don't see how switching to JS/TS comes with any benefit on the backend.
At some point I would have liked to meet people who struggle using Go on the backend and learn what their process is and how they structure things. I've written quite a few backend systems in Go for a variety of domains (anything from PKI systems to industrial automation and various real-time streaming systems). Surely people who struggle must either do something that is very different from what I do, or be sensitive to entirely different issues than I am.
Also, one major thing I'm missing personally is automatically generated OpenAPI specifications + API documentation & API clients autogenerated from it. Last time I checked Go, you had to write the spec manually, which is just ridiculous — the code already has all the necessary info, and duplicating that effort is time-consuming and error-prone (the spec says one thing, the code does another). This may be out of date, but if it still isn't, it is enough to disqualify the stack completely for me.
Also, I don't think there anything similar in the Go world to these administration panels:
https://docs.djangoproject.com/en/5.1/ref/contrib/admin/
which are just fantastic for intranet projects and/or quick prototyping.
I get wanting to be productive and gravitating towards patterns you’re familiar with but in the end it’s all bloat. http can do routing and patterns and cookies and sessions. database/sql can do your DAL work. uuid (various implementations) work for user/tenant uid+oid obfuscation. JWT libs for auth. You can literally json.unmarshal your config for your whole application or use godotenv to use environment variables. template/html for views. Golang has batteries, it’s just you don’t know what you don’t know so you expect a certain perspective that isn’t how we do things. Like joining a new company, things are different here. If you spent some time to learn the “go way” you’d realize that you don’t need the bloat, you just need the structure. The “where I expect it”.
They want something that reads the go code they have written and creates an openapi spec used to generate clients in other languages.
https://github.com/swaggo/swag
And this one seems to generate documentation from code rather than annotations/comments etc
I'd much rather have engineers write OpenAPI specification files by hand and then generate their server code from that file. Way easier to maintain and actually forces devs to have good documentation for their APIs.
I have seen things that generate server stubs but have not encountered something that enforces things like error code/response types etc.
I am actually using this for a production site that gets 1 million requests per day.
In large orgs with customer-facing APIs, it's imperative that you can validate and enforce OAS specifications against all routes. Customers need to know exactly what auth mechanisms they can use and shouldn't be enabled to call undocumented capabilities. It's also important from a practical perspective that developers can scaffold up new routes that are always-already bound to a specification. Depending on the context you either need to do "contract first" specification or "code first" generation based on type system introspection.
Go can let you knock something together yourself but as your team gets larger, the overhead of reviewing and marshaling your team's practices gets more and more difficult.
It's like the problem you have with NodeJS. It's very possible to assemble something that has easy to scaffold routes with strong type-to-spec validation, authn/z, no exposure of undocumented APIs. But without something like NestJS or Adonis each project becomes a special snowflake with no support for interop across repositories.
I love that I at my workplace I can use a service template that wires everything together. And I don't understand why people want to do boring solved tasks over and over again.
Reinventing that basic logic takes a lot of code and time for a bug-ridden, worse, half-implementation. And on top it will be completely home-grown, any new hire will have to learn it from the barely existing internal "documentation" that wasn't touched in years - making not only initial development multiple times more costly, but every subsequent maintainance as well.
Meanwhile I can just add 3 annotations in Spring/RoR/Django and have solved the problem in a way that a competent new hire will instantly be familiar with.
Also, even the supposed benefits are questionable at best - mechanical sympathy? Like, most of these frameworks sit on top of a highly efficient C web server that just calls some business code for nanoseconds and that's all the "overhead". Python and ruby backends are all over the web and they perform completely fine, even though these are interpreted languages. Java/c# won't even have that problem. I have seen plenty terribly performaning home-grown solution which were designed by a "smart" software astronaut - it's almost like writing a proper web server is a different skill set than typical CRUD business apps.
And lastly, Go feels more productive because it is chock-full of boilerplate. So you can type and type and feel you are so productive, meanwhile in another language you would have just added an annotation and 2 lines and called it a day - it's just a psychological "trick". And "libraries that are easy to compose"? Like, which language has an ecosystem with libraries that are hard to compose? What tools do Go have that would aid in that? I would argue that a more expressive language have way better tools to help with code composition, wouldn't it?
If you're building apps that are understandable to new hires, you're right: it's all just boilerplate CRUD.
> Python and ruby backends are all over the web and they perform completely fine
Python certainly doesn't. I've got one inherited service running in Python/Django, and it quickly grows to 1GB per worker, and even then manages to be so slow larger queries time out. I've written two new services in go, they get more traffic, and they run in 20-60MB, with peaks over 200MB. I can run both services and multiple development versions on a 2 CPU, 4GB machine with room to spare.
> in another language you would have just added an annotation and 2 lines and called it a day
I sincerely doubt that. The only boilerplate in go is the error handling. The rest is comparable to Java/C#.
It isn't like writing a basic CRUD-application in Go is a lot of code.
There is a very well defined architecture for the CRUD part that gives itself to "frameworkification". That part is free to call out to any other business code you deem necessary, this is such a surface you can trivially build on. Your software does complex route planning? Sure, have an endpoint that specifies a config and call out to however complex logic you need, and return the result (or just that you are working on it, and another endpoint will later be available for the results or whatever). But not everything gives rise to such stable surfaces.
> writing a basic CRUD in Go
Well, what about converting strings to business data structures safely? What about complex JSON parsing, serialization, CSRF, preventing injections, session cookies, authN/authZ, easy database CRUD operations?
I’d fundamentally disagree on it being harder to learn than the language itself.
> You can always do better when you start with the domain you are solving and work from there rather than trying to adapt your domain to some generic solution.
I’d even agree! In my view this as a reason to go pro-Laravel and similar opinionated frameworks. They allow you to focus on what actually matters, which is your specific business logic.
Define your data models and the rest follows automatically. Use API Platform to automatically generate a REST API from just your models. Need custom logic in there? Use middleware or define your own routes. You’re really not being hindered by the framework in any way I can think of.
Laravel is truly a beast and IMO not comparable to older Java frameworks.
You don’t have to use these features tho. You don’t have to use the ORM and you could even write your own routing if you really wanted to. To me, this is what makes a good framework: providing everything out of the box for 80/20 solutions and provide appropriate escape hatches if you ever need to do something entirely custom.
Want a react frontend? Use Intertia and get started writing UI and interactivity instead of setting up data flows. Want automatic backends? Use Filament and get Schema-based forms and tables for free.
But I have yet to encounter web app use-cases that go beyond of what Laravel could handle.
Something like this in the Go world would make a great addition, provided there are alternatives and escape hatches present (idk if that’s the case).
Many good frameworks actually started that way, with the open source community stepping in to support. Suddenly loads more people know it and you can depend on that spread of knowledge.
To that extent it’s not that frameworks are unhelpful, they are in fact force multipliers for solutions in the same problem space (e.g saas web dev).
In a similar vein, I think I’d much rather build a game in Godot or Unreal than start framework-free with SDL.
The benefit of something like Django is it provides strong convention, loosely enforced. Everyone on your team needs to know one thing. Everyone can understand the convention, understand each other’s code, new features get added the same way. But it’s also loosely enforced, it’s just Python. So when you need to split from the framework’s convention, you have unlimited escape hatches.
If you want a case study, see Instagram.
The django code is so intertwined and full of circular imports. Custom db managers to handle our multiple dbs with read-replica routing, custom caching solutions, and everything inherits from something and base classes have insane child-type checks and methods that are only used in one child class. And due to the ease of passing query sets around, we have complex and slow joins and n+1 queries everywhere. And object properties that are actually methods that call and cache from the db, so sneaky n+1.
The unlimited escape hatches in python has turned into welded spaghetti making development and organizational velocity slow.
Then I'm afraid you misunderstood.
Frameworks is not the only way to build things efficiently. It is actually possible to build things using libraries and consistent ways of structuring things.
Also, we're talking about Go, so please use Go examples. Django isn't interesting in this context. Have a look at how you'd leverage the standard library, and perhaps a couple of libraries in Go to do the same.
And it is not for lack of asking myself if I wouldn't be more effective if I distilled the practices into some framework. I've had plenty of ideas for frameworks and I always end up throwing them away. The way I structure things is so minimal anyway that there really isn't that much you can gain by creating a framework.
The closest I come is tooling to kickstart projects by using a template driven code generation approach. But that's mostly possible because the way I do things is consistent enough that I can generate the initial code for things like the model types and whatever crud and API I need.
In my 35+ years as a professional developer I have yet to see frameworks actually being force multipliers over time. They tend to have a small window where they look attractive. Then they tend to become a liability at some point.
This post underestimates how much custom code and structure ends up in larger projects that use a framework, or even game engines.
Every single medium-to-big project I worked on for the last 25 years had a different structure and code style, regardless of using a framework or not. Other than the folder structure for the basic structures (often the M, the V and the C), everything would be different. There would be folders for different new "things", but these "things" are always different. Plus with multiple modules for encapsulating business logic that rarely had anything from the framework itself (except as leaky abstractions), different libraries for managing the business logic, etc.
Sure, trivial CRUD apps will always gonna look similar. But at this scale it doesn't matter much
And Go is actually refreshing in this regard, because people actually try to avoid those crazy abstractions. Rails is possibly the worst of the bunch, because it requires way too many third-party libraries for basic stuff (authentication and authorization), and I once even had to order a paid book to get documentation on a specific framework that the previous team who built the app used but didn't provide any documentation online whatsoever (Trailblazer, for the curious).
Comparing that to the go standard library is apples to skyscrapers.
I don't mean to knock on Goravel or things like Apollo, but they got a very very long way to go to even measure up against Django, Rails, or Laravel in terms of functionality.
And for the little that’s not, such as an ORM, there are many third party libraries available if you want to go down that path although it’s not necessary.
There’s nice things about a lot of these frameworks for sure, like ActiveRecord, but you usually just learn the patterns in Go and roll with it. The standard library has its own consistent style.
That's a bold faced lie. In the list, the only things provided by Go are:
- routing: http.ServeMux has a router but until recently it was usually not used in real applications due to very limited capabilities (they finally added proper patterns in 1.22 which, in my view, finally makes it good enough).
- template: it's not even close to laravel's blade capabilities, but yes Go has good enough templating for most tasks.
>routing, middleware
ogen (OpenAPI code generator), or a similar library
>database connections
from Go's stdlib mostly
>an ORM
sqlx (a lightweight wrapper around Go's stdlib which allows to hydrate results into structs)
>authentication, sessions
homegrown stuff, due to existing complex legacy stuff
>job queues
RabbitMQ's official Go wrapper (rabbitmq/amqp091-go)
>email sending
we delegate to a few separate VMs which already have postfix installed (and have good reputation)
>dependency injection
manual construction, works fine if split correctly
>logging
sirupsen/logrus (structured logger)
>view template rendering
React
>metrics
official Go wrappers for Prometheus
Some of this stuff is already IMHO industry-standard (the default libs people reach to). To streamline creation of new services, we have a tool which can scaffold your project with all these dependencies already set up.
All of the time you spent on building your scaffolding tool, researching on the libraries, checking and updating their version regularly; all of that isn’t necessary with a full-stack framework.
Once more: I’m not dismissing Go, or your way to set up projects, I’m just surprised someone would make the comparison to the Go std lib, which is so obviously not on the same level of integration and battery inclusion.
It's as simple as calling smtp.SendMail("hostname:smtp", nil, from, to, message)
I will say that there are queries that take 2-3 minutes to write in SQL where you have to bang your head into the wall to make the problem fit into an ORM-shaped box. (and vice versa)
A bigger problem are developers who haven't never truly learned to write SQL (outside of a few basic statements; akin to a React developer who never really learned Javascript)
You can write any possible SQL query in SQL, but you can't write all of them in an ORM (without falling back to native SQL queries)
SQL is strictly more powerful.
Sometimes it's also way more verbose.
So I agree that you should be able to leverage both tools, but they are not even remotely as powerful.
I every project we used ORM for, at some point we had to jump through hoops and write plain old SQL (depending on the language and framework that's simple or terribly complex), because we had to fix the n+1 query problem.
In every project, since more than 18 years!
I never said that. I said that it's harder to do and there's no reason not to use an ORM to make it easier.
net/http (even middlewares are just http.HandleFunc)
> database connections
We were using database/sql for the longest of times before switching to pgx since we wanted some convenience functions.
> email sending
net/mail gets you far enough unless you want to scale it.
> logging
log/slog (which is actually production grade compared to log/log)
> view template rendering
text/template, but I also think Laravel is a better choice if that’s your main focus.
Others either need an experimental standard library package (e.g. golang.org/x/crypto/argon2 for stuff like authentication) or finally need third party dependencies. DI is not enforced like other frameworks, but an extremely common pattern in Go.
At this point, do I really want to bring out a whole framework just for the last few requirements?
Go is Turing complete, sure it can do all things Laravel can. But the whole point is that with a proper full-Stack framework, you’ll get everything in a single, maintained, tested, streamlined, coherent, and documented bundle.
So you are saying this is only possible if you use a large framework? You cannot do this with libraries? That's a very odd position.
JSON has never been a problem as it is part of the standard library. And there are lots of libraries to extend the functionality if you need something the standard library doesn't offer.
Heck, Go even has ASN.1 in the standard library so I can write custom serialization of certificates to satisfy fiddly crypto components that only work with certain representations. And it was surprisingly easy to do. If it is one thing Go is really good for, it is writing robust code for transforming data.
Learn to do things using the standard library first. Then learn what libraries to add and keep a collection of snippets and notes on how to use them so you can apply them quickly when you need them. Learn once, take notes, use again.
Those are solved problems in Go's standard library. And let's be fair: while some frameworks do a lot of stuff, the majority is very bare bones and just automate serialization, so compare with the average. And some even cause even more problems than they solve (Rails mass-assignment).
> CSRF
Available in several routers, if you choose to use a custom one, or in the form of middleware if necessary.
> preventing injections
Which kind? For SQL, database/sql provides the tools necessary for avoiding SQLi, and requires the same care/discipline you'd need on a big-framework app. For XSS just use the builtin facilities of html/template rather than reinventing the wheel.
> session cookies
Library, if it's not in the router of your choosing.
> authN/authZ
Once again, let's be fair. AuthN didn't exist on Rails for 20 years, for example (and is still quite bare bones compared to libraries). AuthZ still doesn't. In Spring and .NET both also require libraries. So just use a Library in Go?
> easy database CRUD operations?
What's that, ORMs? SQL Generators? They do exist in Go.
I was just pointing out that framework-less Go projects can have SQLX, ORM, etc, if you want to!