Hacker News Reader

Comment by victorbjorklund | Hacker News Reader

honestly sucks trying to build a large web app with just the go stdlib. The stdlib is amazing but it is not all you need for a good dx experience.

View on HN

A rich stdlib establishes patterns and provides standard types for other libraries and frameworks, making the whole thing generally more consistent as opposed to something like the Node.js ecosystem, which looks and feels more like a bunch of random parts crudely fitted together through copious use of duck tape and glue.

Concretely, Go has eg context.Context, net.Conn, http.Handler and of course io.Writer/Reader/Closer. All 3p libs will use the standard types. This means you can compose many 3p building blocks together, without any prior knowledge or coordination on their end.

When you have an insufficient stdlib, you often get compatibility issues, where things don’t compose. So you get these kind of pseudo-std mega frameworks like Tokio instead. It was a while ago I was deep in JS but I remember similar things there.

Really? What do you feel that it's missing? I write Go for a living but I have also used Laravel (and vanilla php back in the day),and both actix + axum and I think Go really does hit that sweet spot of abstraction level for backends/web services.

I will say that I do prefer Gorm only to be used to scan the table -> model, I'd still rather write the sql by hand but I also don't want to scan the rows every time. But other than that I really cannot think of what it's missing.

Have you given sqlx a try? Manual query writing like database/SQL but convenience wrapper functions that handle the row scanning part for you. I haven't felt the need to use anything else for years now.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com