Top Golang Frameworks for Gophers
Golang (Go) is a general purpose programming language by Google. Many Developers have embraced Go because it’s fast, efficient, offers concurrency, garbage collection, memory safety, and a structural typing system.
According to the 2022 Stack Overflow Developer survey, Go is one of the best-paid technologies and the second most “demanded” backend programming language.
Popular Companies that have already embraced Go include the following:
Google, YouTube, Apple, Amazon, Facebook, Netflix, Dropbox, Docker, BBC, IBM, Twitter, Spotify, Soundcloud, Uber, SendGrid, and of course Property Finder…
Why Go frameworks?
Finding the right web framework is essential as it will save precious time and resources while developing an application. A framework also supports the development process allowing Developers to use their energy on building the features and functionality rather than having to write the base code.
Go frameworks provide many advantages to a development team:
- Eliminating code redundancy and duplication
- Better code security
- Helping to improve consistency in code
- Fewer bugs
- Improving reliability
- Easier testing and debugging processes
- Improving programming productivity
- Helping to establish better programming practices
- Stronger documentation
Are you planning to develop using Go and confused which framework to choose? Here is a list of popular Go Frameworks:
Now, let’s delve into each one of these frameworks individually looking at their main features, pros and cons:
1. Gin Gonic
Gin is considered a very minimalistic framework. It was built based on Martini. Gin Gonic focuses on significant features libraries, uses HTTP router, the quickest HTTP router of Go language which makes it 40x faster and quicker than Martini.Gin has made monitoring or debugging very simple. Gin is highly suitable for building extremely high-performing Rest Apis.
Documentation : Gin Gonic Documentation
Significant features:
- Speed : Gin is a fast framework because of its route grouping and small memory. It’s built on HttpRouter, a lightweight, high-performance HTTP request router. Gin has a low memory footprint and it provides faster performance.
- Great error management and crash recovery : Gin makes it easy to track errors occurring during an HTTP request.
When an error is encountered in a HTTP request Gin documents the errors:
- Easily Extendable : It’s also very easy to create middleware which can be plugged into the request pipeline:
Creating a router and adding middlewares:
- Built-in rendering:
Gin provides an easy to use API for JSON, XML and HTML rendering.
Build with JSON replacement:
Gin uses encoding/json as the default json package but you can change it by building from other tags:
Build without MsgPack rendering feature
Gin enables MsgPack rendering feature by default. But you can disable this feature by specifying nomsgpack build tag:
Pros
- Gin includes only essential features, libraries, and functionalities
- Extensive documentation available
- Well-tested and numerous middlewares
- Reduces boilerplate code
- Reasonable exception capture and error handling,
- Fast running speed, good packet routing.
Cons
- Gin is not suitable for applications that require a large backend or several complex server functions and features as it is suited for building REST API.
Some notable companies use Gin Gonic in their tech stacks, including AB180, SWORD Health, Teachable,SpartanGeek, Sezzle, and SEASON,Wevox, Aircloset, Screeb, Shippo etc.
2. Beego
Beego is the next framework up for review. Beego has great functionalities and features similar to django for python. It is mostly used to develop enterprise web applications. Beego has a fully-fledged Model-View-Controller (MVC) framework with its own libraries and built-in tools.
Example
Documentation : Beego Documentation
Significant Features:
- Bee Tool: BeeTool watches out for code changes and runs tasks when changes
- Fully fledged Built in modules: Beego has built in ORM system, built-in cache handler, faster processing and traffic routing, session management tools, automated testing and automated deployment.
- Great Routing and Monitoring: It’s also very easy to monitor your QPS, memory and CPU usages, and go routine status.
- High Performance: With native Go http package to handle the requests and the efficient concurrence of go routine, Beego applications can handle massive traffic.
Pros
- RESTful support,
- MVC Architecture.
- Modularity
- Auto API documents,
- Annotation router,
- Faster development,
- Powerful development tools, Full stack for Web & API.
Cons
- Caching: Beego caches previous versions of pages, which is fine for user experience, but it can lead to silent build failure.
- Less community support.
Companies using Beego include Getyoutubers, Danale Inc, Huawei Opera, 360, Youdao, Weico, Jd.com, Bmob, Ardan studios, Taobao.com, Tencent games etc.
3. Go Kit
The kit framework is a programming toolkit for building robust, reliable and maintainable microservices in the Golang.kit. This framework gives RPC safety, system observability and infrastructure integration. Kit provides separation of Concerns (transport layer, endpoint layer, service layer). Using go-kit results in clean, reliable and maintainable codebases
REST API:
Documentation : Kit Documentation
Significant Features
- Transport: Go kit ships with support for HTTP, gRPC, Thrift, and net/rpc, NATS, AMQP,Kafka
- Service Recovery: Go kit ships with support for Consul, etcd, ZooKeeper, and DNS SRV records.
- Observability: Go kit ships with support for modern monitoring systems like Prometheus and InfluxDB, as well as more traditional systems like statsd, Graphite, and expvar, and hosted systems like Datadog via DogStatsD and Circonus.
- Logging: Go kit’s package log has evolved through many design iterations, extensive benchmarking, and plenty of real-world use to arrive at its current state.
Pros
- Separation of concerns : Go- kit nicely separates the business logic, endpoint and transport,Low-level libraries,
- The Clean Architecture and Domain-Driven Design
- Middlewares to encode logic with single responsibility principle,
- Adapters for common infrastructure components,
- Makes Go attractive to the organization by providing solutions to common problems of distributed programming like distributed tracing, monitoring and instrumentation, clean architecture.
- Good for both micro services and monoliths
Cons
- Heavy use of interfaces
- Overhead of adding API : To create a simple api you need to add a lot of code Function in the interface, Implementation, Endpoint factory function, Transport function, Request encoder, Request decoder, Response encoder and Response decoder, Add the endpoint to the server, Add the endpoint to the client etc.
4 . Echo
Echo is created by Labstack. It is a micro framework consisting of a standard library and a router with very good documentation. Echo allows Developers to define their own middleware and has built-in middleware to use as well.
Example
Documentation : Echo Documentation
Significant Features
- Optimized Router:Highly optimized HTTP router with zero dynamic memory allocation which smartly prioritizes routes.
- Scalability: Build robust and scalable RESTful API, easily organized into groups.
- Automatic TLS: Automatically install TLS certificates from Let’s Encrypt.
- HTTP/2 support: HTTP/2 support improves speed and provides better user experience.
- Middlewares: Many built-in middleware to use, or define your own. Middleware can beset at root, group or route level.
- Data Binding : Data binding for HTTP request payload, including JSON, XML or form-data.
- Data Rendering: API to send a variety of HTTP responses, including JSON, XML, HTML, File, Attachment, Inline, Stream or Blob.
- Templating: Template rendering using any template engine.
- Extensibility: Customized central HTTP error handling. Easily extendable API.
Pros
- Easy to use
- Light weight
- Easily customizable and extensible
- Minimal
- High performance
- Documentation
- Nicer handler func signature (returning an error)
- A router without absurd pattern matching issues
- Centralized HTTP error handling
Cons
- Lack of support
- Infrequent code updates
some companies reportedly use Echo in their tech stacks, including Hepsiburada, tools, GAPO, Modanisa.com, Finema, The Lonero Foundation, FLUX,arivu. one, Nuxi, Agflow, Orangesys, The Lonero Foundation, Ant Media Server, AI and Robotics ventures etc.
Other Popular frameworks
5. Fiber
Fiber is one of the fastest Go frameworks. Fiber is an express inspired framework with low memory usage and rich routing. Built on top of the Fasthttp which is the fastest HTTP engine for Go, it has been created with the main focus of minimalism.
Example
Documentation : Fiber Documentation
Significant Features
- Built-in Rate Limiter:Used to limit repeated requests to public APIs and/or endpoints
- Serve Static Files: Static files, like style sheets, scripts, and images can be easily cached, resulting in less memory, and the content remains static upon every request.
- Extreme performance: JSON serialization, database access and server-side template composition.
- Robust routing
- Low memory footprint
- Middleware support
- Rapid server-side programming
- Template engines
- WebSocket support
- Server-Sent events
- Translated in 16 languages
Pros
- Rich routing
- Fast
- Low memory consumption
- Support most popular template engines
Cons
- No support for http2
Some of the companies reportedly using Go-Fiber in their tech stacks, including GAPO, Modanisa.com, and Cartesius, issac, bitkub.
6. Revel
A high-productivity fully featured web framework. Revel always ranks as one of the top frameworks on the list and it came up with innovative features and functionalities. It is a self-sufficient framework that does not require any third-party plugins or middleware.
Documentation : Revel Documentation
Significant Features
- Full Featured: Revel is fully featured out of the box, with packaged libraries and feature sets for everything from small to complex tasks.
- Hot code reload:Code reload tool compiles your code and templates.
- Comprehensive:Revel provides routing, parameter parsing, validation, session/flash, templating, caching, job running, a testing framework and even internationalization.
- Reusable MVC components
- Flow control:Revel is built around composable middleware called filters, which implement nearly all request-processing functionality.
- Stateless:Revel provides primitives that keep the web tier stateless for predictable scaling.
- Go mod ready
Pros
- Fully fledged
- Efficiency
- Ease to Learn
- Popularity
- Community support
- No third-party middleware, configuration, plugin and setup]
Cons
- Large codebase: not a lean framework
- No MongoDB support : mongo support can be added using third party implementations
- Non idiomatic code
companies reportedly use Revel in their tech stacks, including Atcoder.jp, backend, and Simon G,Jackpot Rising, Adwisely
7. Gorilla
Gorilla is one of the top Golang frameworks. Gorilla is popular in the application development communities. Gorilla provides http library’s reusable elements and components. Its’ design is modular, scalable and supports web sockets.
Example
Documentation : Gorilla Documentation
Significant Features
- It implements the http.Handler interface so it is compatible with the standard http.ServeMux.
- Requests can be matched based on URL host, path, path prefix, schemes, header and query values, HTTP methods or using custom matchers.
- URL hosts, paths and query values can have variables with an optional regular expression.
- Registered URLs can be built, or “reversed”, which helps maintain references to resources.
- Routes can be used as sub routers: nested routes are only tested if the parent route matches. This is useful to define groups of routes that share common conditions like a host, a path prefix or other repeated attributes. As a bonus, this optimizes request matching.
- It has Bolster WebSockets
- Gorilla is also the largest web framework which caters to Net/HTTP library’s reusable components
Pros
- Routing: it’s packed full of features, including support for method-based routing, dynamic URLs, regex route patterns, and host-based routing. Importantly, it’s the only router on this shortlist which supports custom routing rules and route ‘reversing’ . It also allows setting custom handlers for 404 and 405 responses.
- Gorilla can be easily scaled can add/remove packages, extensions, etc,
- Reusable elements and components.
Cons
- Configuration effort: Gorilla requires more time and effort to configure components,
- Performance: There’s a decrease in performance between Gorilla and other “lean” frameworks.
8. Goji
Goji is a lightweight, minimalistic and flexible web framework. The features of Goji include re-configurable middleware stack, shutdown, and URL pattern. Goji is a HTTP request multiplexer, similar to net/http.ServeMux .
Example
Documentation : Goji Documentation
Significant features
- Compatible with net/httpURL patterns
- Reconfigurable middleware stack
- Context/environment object threaded through middleware and handlers
- Automatic support for Einhorn
- Graceful shutdown, and zero-downtime graceful reload when combined with Einhorn.
- supports Web-socket.
Pros
- Thin: an abstraction layer — very minimal ,lightweight and efficient
- Einhorn: Integrates with Einhorn, a language agnostic socket manager that provides out of the box web socket supportWeb socket assistance to the developers for support
- Goji has a minimalistic HTTP request multiplexer
- Stability
- Not suitable for large enterprise projects.
Other Mentions:
Final Thoughts
Each one of these frameworks have an array of capabilities and functionalities that can be used and adopted. Before you choose the one that is right for your requirements, ensure you fully assess the needs of the project and then recommend the right framework to match those requirements.
