Why this kind of project ? Because I used Active Record (Rails), Entity Framework, played with Django ORM, ... and regretted that nothing similar exist in Go world. Instead of complaining I choose to do something, not building a full ORM by myself, but at least build something allowing me to have a better comprehension of the constraints (except of the classic "no generic").
I didn't choose to build another Go library thinking I'll build something better than others. I learned, and I got a library ;)
One thing you can say about Go is it has 1000 Micro-frameworks, ORMs, Routers, and Logging libraries. Most of them are within a percent of giving the exact same feature set with the exact same approach and and ever so slightly different API. Lots of them share the same mistakes as they are a user's first project or a learning arena (though routing has been a pretty benchmarked area so that's been better than the others).
As someone who has open source libraries, and who uses Go in their day job and at home my personal opinion is that Go needs fewer, stronger libraries. Well supported, well maintained pieces rather than this illusion of choice that's presented today. I'm sorry if I came off as crass in my reply to the OP but that's simply the state I see in the community today.
Ideally there'd be 2-4 ORMs in Go that would be the goto. And half would use a code-generation approach, half would use the reflection based approach.
https://github.com/astaxie/beego/tree/master/orm https://github.com/cosiner/gomodel https://github.com/jinzhu/gorm https://github.com/go-gorp/gorp https://github.com/coocood/qbs https://github.com/go-reform/reform https://github.com/vattle/sqlboiler https://github.com/upper/db https://github.com/astaxie/beedb https://github.com/naoina/genmai https://github.com/monochromegane/argen https://github.com/square/squalor https://github.com/theduke/go-dukedb https://github.com/dropbox/godropbox/tree/master/database/sq... (...and more) And now: https://github.com/samonzeweb/godb
Do we truly need this? This one in particular feels a lot like upperdb. And if it's for learning only, don't publish it to things like hackers news which makes people seem like it's something you should use as opposed to the more mature libraries out there. This is what I meant by fragmentation, it's an illusion of choice. There are actually very few logging/routing/orm/micro-framework libraries you should really use if you're serious about a project.
I have a very high bar for open source personally and I tend to view it "more hardcore". I think that if you're putting open source out there to a wide audience such as this that you have a contract with the people you're putting it out to that you're going to maintain what's there and ensure it's of high quality. And if you're going to go to that level of effort why not contribute to something that's already mountains of work ahead of you and effectively the same code anyway (upperdb/gorp/gorm/xorm in this case)?
I have many Go repositories on my Github account that I've used for learning - but I've never put any of them out there to wide audiences that were solved by a more popular project in the same way - the approach has always been radically different. When I couldn't find logging libraries I liked I tried using others and contributed to them. I've also never put anything out there that I don't intend on maintaining basically forever. So my behavior is consistent with my viewpoint for whatever that's worth.
My colleague suggests that other people use open source for different reasons and view it much differently than me, and that's possibly the misunderstanding here. I shouldn't try to reflect my opinion in that sense on others and I do apologize for that. I suppose "if it were me" I wouldn't have done what he has, and I was commenting as if people knew and understood that as a commonality - which isn't probably true.
Also - I think you hugely overstated my bias for my own library. I'd be just as happy if he had not posted this and worked on gorp instead. /shrug.
Also I've been waiting for a long time for Go's libraries to be converged on - hasn't happened yet :)