When comparing Gin-gonic vs Go-rest, the Slant community recommends Gin-gonic for most people. In the question“What are the best web frameworks for Go?” Gin-gonic is ranked 1st while Go-rest is ranked 14th. The most important reason people chose Gin-gonic is:
The documentation for Gin is broad and comprehensive. Most tasks that you will need to do relating to the router can be found easily in the docs.
Ranked in these QuestionsQuestion Ranking
Pros
Pro Extensive documentation
The documentation for Gin is broad and comprehensive. Most tasks that you will need to do relating to the router can be found easily in the docs.
Pro Good for building REST APIs
Gin is a pretty minimalistic framework. Only the most essential features and libraries are included, making Gin a great framework for developing high-performance REST APIs.
Pro Well-tested and numerous middlewares
The Gin community has created numerous well-tested middlewares that make developing for Gin a charm. Features include gzip, an authorization middleware, and sentry.
Pro High performance
Gin runs 40x faster than Martini, and runs comparatively well compared to other Golang frameworks.
Pro Easy to learn
The API is a small as it gets with only 3 methods HandleGET
, HandlePOST
and RunServer
. Making it rather easy to learn just for that fact.
Cons
Con Might not be suitable for large backend applications
Gin-gonic is great for building a REST API for the backend if you want to develop an SPA using a frontend framework. But for anything that requires more features on the server side, it would be better to use a more "batteries included" framework.
Con Not very active
Latest commit was September 2015. Plus, there doesn't seem like there's much of a community surrounding it. Which results in fewer resources (guides or libraries) and a higher risk of Go-rest being abandoned one day.