Go Minimalist & Modern Stack

Minimalist stack for Go and dev tools for Go.

Go Minimalist & Modern Stack

The definitive, modern toolchain and library stack for Go development, optimized for speed, simplicity, minimal runtime overhead, and strict type safety.

• Runtime Environment: Go 1.21+

  • Chosen over older versions for the inclusion of the structured logging package slog in the standard library, built-in functions min, max, and clear, and toolchain management improvements that automatically download the requested Go version, along with continuous compiler optimizations (such as Profile-Guided Optimization).

• Package Manager: go mod (Go Modules)

  • Go’s native dependency management system. Guarantees zero third-party dependency resolution overhead, reproducibility via go.sum hashes, and native integration into the standard Go toolchain without requiring external tool dependencies.

• Formatter: gofmt

  • The standard Go formatting tool. Zero configuration, zero formatting arguments. Guarantees 100% consistent styling across all Go codebases globally, eliminating formatting bikeshedding entirely.

• Linter: golangci-lint

  • Chosen over standard go vet: golangci-lint runs dozens of linters in parallel (using caching and Go AST reuse) to catch concurrency bugs, code smells, performance issues, and security vulnerabilities that standard go vet completely misses. It aggregates multiple popular linters (such as staticcheck, errcheck, goimports, and revive) into a single, unified, and highly configurable runner.

• Test Runner: go test with testify

  • Go’s native testing tool is lightweight, extremely fast, and supports running tests in parallel. testify is added to provide clean, readable assertion helper methods (e.g., assert.Equal, assert.NoError) without introducing bloated framework abstractions, maintaining full compatibility with the native testing.T struct.

• Web/API Router: Chi

  • Chosen over Gin: Gin uses a custom context and custom handler signatures, breaking compatibility with the standard library’s http.Handler and standard middleware. Gin also has a larger memory footprint and does not support standard routing patterns as cleanly.
  • Chosen over Fiber: Fiber is built on fasthttp, which is not fully HTTP/1.1 or HTTP/2 compliant, breaks standard net/http compatibility, uses unsafe memory practices that can lead to bugs, and does not run on platforms that require standard network interfaces.
  • Chosen over Echo: Echo is a full-featured framework with its own custom context type, which adds runtime overhead and makes it harder to share middleware with standard library routers.
  • Chi’s benefits: Chi is a lightweight, 100% stdlib-compatible router with zero external dependencies. It compiles to zero allocations per route match, supports sub-routers for clean modular code, and allows seamless integration of standard HTTP middleware.

• SQL Generator / ORM: sqlc

  • Chosen over GORM: GORM is a heavy ORM that uses runtime reflection, leading to slow queries, high CPU usage, and type-unsafe code (e.g., passing strings for column/table names). It abstracts the SQL database, which can lead to inefficient queries and N+1 query problems.
  • Chosen over standard database/sql: Writing raw SQL with standard database/sql requires manual scanning of rows into structs, which is repetitive, error-prone if columns change, and lacks type safety.
  • sqlc’s benefits: sqlc takes raw SQL queries and schemas, parses them, and compiles them into completely type-safe Go code. It provides compile-time query validation, zero runtime reflection overhead, and extremely fast execution times since it generates standard Go code that uses the native database driver directly.

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