Golang Guide: A List of Top Golang Frameworks, IDEs & Tools

Since its introduction, Google’s Go Programming Language (Golang) has been experiencing an increasing popularity among mainstream users. In a December 2016 survey, 89% of the 3,595 respondents claimed that they program in Go at work or outside of work.

Additionally, Go ranks highest among the programming languages in terms of expertise and preference. This July 2017, Go ranks 10th in Tiobe’s Programming Language of the Year, jumping from its 55th ranking last year.

Clearly, Go is attracting many programmers from various disciplines and software development outsourcing

As a compiled, open-source programming language, Go makes it easy for developers to build simple, reliable, and efficient software. It is the product of the innovation and evolution of the more conservative languages such as C and C++.

With Go, the amount of code typing is reduced and writing robust APIs without sacrificing its performance has become easier. Designed for scalability and concurrency, Go makes optimizations possible. A compiler can perform all the code inspection work before runtime.

We’ve compiled a list of the top frameworks, IDEs, and tools for Golang for your quick reference. Bookmark it on your browser so that you can come back whenever you’re working with Go!

Frameworks for Golang

Web frameworks help developers build applications as easily and quickly as possible. Go is still relatively new, so it’s important to use frameworks with sufficient documentation.

Here are 9 frameworks you can use to help you build projects using the Go Language.

1. Revel

As a high productivity framework for Go, Revel includes a Hot Code Reload tool that lets you rebuild your project on every file change. It also includes a wide variety of comprehensive and high-performance features, so you don’t need to find external libraries to integrate into the framework.

2. Beego

Beego is a full-fledged MVC framework with its own logging library, ORM, and web frameworks. You don’t need to find and install third-party libraries. It features a built-in tool called Bee Tool that watches out for code changes and runs tasks when changes are detected.

Beego will save you a lot of hours, especially in the beginning of a project when you’re figuring out the logging framework or application structure.

3. Martini

Inspired by Sinatra, Martini is an extremely light but powerful framework. It was developed for writing modular web applications and services in Golang.

It features a non-intrusive design that’s quick and easy to use and includes a wide range of handlers and middleware. It’s capable of performing basic routing, exception handling, and default document serving for AngularJS apps in HTML5 mode.

Martini’s best feature is its use of reflection, which lets developers dynamically insert data into the handler functions and add new services. Martini is also fully compatible with the http.HandlerFunc interface. The downside, though, is that the Martini framework is no longer maintained.

4. Gin Gonic

Gin Gonic is a web framework with a martini-like API, but with much better performance. If you’ve used Martini before, then you’ll be familiar with Gin Gonic. Otherwise, it will only take you 10 minutes to learn Gin. It’s that easy!

Gin Gonic is a minimalistic framework that includes only the most essential libraries and features. This makes it perfect for developing high-performance REST APIs. Plus, it’s 40 times faster than Martini.

You can add middleware, nested groups, JSON validation, and rendering, but it still maintains its optimum performance. Gin Gonic uses httprouter, the fastest HTTP router for Go.

5. Buffalo

Building new web applications with Go is quick and simple with Buffalo. When you’re starting a new project, Buffalo already has everything setup for you — from front-end to back-end development.

It features Hot Reloading, which means that dev command will watch your .go and .html files automatically. It will then rebuild and restart your binary for you. Just run the dev command, and you’ll see the changes go live right before your eyes!

Buffalo is more than just a framework — it’s a holistic web development eco-system that lets you get straight to building your application.

6. Goji

Goji is a lightweight and fast web framework that has composability and simplicity as its main priority. Much like net/http.ServeMux, Goji is a minimalistic HTTP request multiplexer. It includes Einhorn support, which makes it possible for you to have websocket support in Goji.

Additional features include URL patterns, re-configurable middleware stack, graceful shutdown, and more. Goji can be used in production and has served billions of requests across several organizations.

7. Tiger Tonic

Inspired by Dropwizard, Tiger Tonic is a Go framework for developing JSON web services and building high-performance REST APIs. To stay true to the principles of Golang, Tiger Tonic strives to keep features orthogonal.

The downside to Tiger Tonic is its inadequacy when it comes to building large, back-end applications.

8. Gocraft

Another powerful yet minimalistic framework, Gocraft offers fast and scalable routing performance. It adds routing to the net/http package from the standard library.

Gocraft is a Go mux and middleware package that features casting and reflection capabilities so that you can type your code statically. You can also add an optional functionality with the built-in middleware or write your own.

Since performance is always one of the top concerns for developers, Gocraft is a great choice for developers. It’s very easy to write backend web applications using the Gocraft framework.

9. Mango

Although Mango is not actively maintained by its creator, Paul Bellamy, a lot of Go users still use it. The great thing about Mango is its modularity. You can choose from a variety of libraries to include in your project.

Mango lets you build reusable modules of HTTP functionality as quickly and easily as possible. It compiles a list of middleware and application into a single http server object to keep your code self-contained.