This article makes an assumption: you know how to build the application better than framework developers do, which is not the case in general. Django docs are tremendous and you probably do not need most of it but in reality many of them cover real-world cases and do it in a good way. Sure, it may be a question of minimal code to implement it in go, but you have to know that you need this specific feature and you need to know how to implement it.

I've been doing small projects with go for a while and while I enjoy doing it in go (I like the predictability that types bring to me and the fact that I do not need to go through the tomes of docs to figure out something) I still feel every single time that I'm reinnventing the wheel.

The task is simpler with SPAs since all you need from go is a json api, but if you want to build something complete with htmx you'll have to deal with many questions yourself. E.g.

- orm / db access

- Signup / login flow

- Emails

- Static assets versioning

- template helpers

- CSRF?

- Routing and reverse routing

- Page structures (you want to have the same field to look up page title, right?

- Partials for your templates (how do you do form validation in a nice and generic way)

There is a lot of stuff like this. None of this is impossible to solve, it's quite easy in most cases actually, but it adds up and as I said, you have to know how to do it write

One thing for sure is that if you implement the concepts yourself you don't need to abstract them away too much (or maybe you do if you want to reuse all the nice things in your next project). For me the most compelling thing is types and the fact that I'm not dealing with django/laravel magic with long stacktraces that are meaningless to me, but I still return to thinking about doing next project with rails from time to time, just because I've implemented form validation hundred times already.

One good point about frameworks is about limitations - they are there and this is something that's quite hard to overcome at times. Rails framework does things the certain way and if you want to do it differently you have to fight with the framwork or make an attempt to push things to upstream which I'm pretty sure is not the main goal of your project.

(edit: made list a list)