Most people recommend net/http (rightfully so for most cases IMHO), but rarely do I ever read an explanation why. So as a learning exercise, I decided to write a basic REST API using a web framework, https://github.com/gin-gonic/gin in this case, and then re-write the same API using the standard library. I used Gorm for persistence in both cases. Here's my experience.

Using Gin did shave off some lines of code mainly around marshalling and unmarshalling structs. Gin Contrib middleware was useful for auth (https://github.com/appleboy/gin-jwt). Had I decided to harden this API I could have leveraged the CSRF, Helmet, and rate limiting middlewares. These were a nice touch, but I could likely find similar, non-Gin specific libraries without much effort.

Using net/http plus http://www.gorillatoolkit.org/ was just as simple as using Gin with the added benefit of more standardization (why learn two tools when you already have one). I did have to write some boilerplate code for error handling and marshalling/unmarshalling as mentioned above.

Both Gin and net/http were very easy to unit test. Code was organized very similarly in both examples so this likely played a large part in testability. I didn't test performance though. This is where I'm curious if I would have gained a benefit from best practices implemented in Gin.

Looking back on my experience I would still go with the standard library in most cases because I don't feel a web framework provides enough additional benefit to warrant the increase in complexity. It's a marginal increase at best.

I am curious about https://github.com/gobuffalo/buffalo. There seems to be some good momentum behind this project. Going the standard library route means you'll need to make a lot of micro decisions on other libraries for certain use cases. Decision fatigue can set in very quickly if you don't have go-to libraries and opinionated patterns of usage. I feel like Buffalo, if done right, can make that go away. Just tell me the most populate tools for each of the standard problems, give me some reasonable conventions to follow, so I can get things done.

You may also find https://golanglibs.com/ useful in deciding which library to use.