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How I Wrote Express-Go in 19 Hours

Bruno Ciccarino λ on October 19, 2024

If you've ever worked with web frameworks like Express.js, you know how convenient and easy to use they can be. Now, imagine this ease in Go, wit...
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TMD

Nicely done! I once wrote an RPC web server in Go before generics were a thing using the reflect package quite intensively. Writing your own router is such an interesting and sometimes frustrating process. I love the flexibility I have, but you keep discovering corner cases such as OPTIONS header, the obvious CORS, returning errors and subsequently their appropriate error codes etc... Then maybe you want to return a file rather than json and that becomes a thing.

Similar to your code, I never really liked the syntax of adding an additional return line rather than doing it on one line. But maybe that's just a me thing. I also have it in mine.

res.Status(http.StatusInternalServerError).Send("Error encoding JSON")
        return
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In any case, this is great stuff. I'm sure those 19h were intense but full of interest and curiosity. From my learnings, I now use what I'd probably say is the standard Mux router. It's not exactly how I'd like to do things, but it's shielded me from a lot of corner cases and has made building my current project (temp mail detector) a lot simpler and quicker.

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Bruno Ciccarino λ

Congratulations on the project, I'm sure it was rewarding to write it, writing a router is very interesting, even more so when you focus on simplicity. One thing I noticed is, writing generic code is more difficult than it seems, there were a few hours when my brain went wrong and I got stuck, that's why it took me so long. and I'm going to take a look at this mux project, it looks very interesting.

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TMD

Absolutely. More often than not you write something generic and then realise later on there's a better way to do it. All part of the fun.

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Evandro Abreu Domingues

Your work is very good. What would be the next step? Create the manipulation of the methods (get, post, pu, delete ...)

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Bruno Ciccarino λ • Edited

I spent yesterday afternoon thinking and made a to-do list, I have some goals for this micro framework, if anyone wants to help, all help is welcome.

  • 1) Implement this manipulation of methods as you said (get, post put and delete)

  • 2) Implement middleware against CSRF, auth middleware, and implement a time out system in the format of a middleware

  • 3) create a website for documentation, with more examples and maintaining colloquial language to make it easier to understand...

  • 4) Improvements in error management and customized responses.

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Kev

What do you think about enhancing this with next function and w.locals?

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Bruno Ciccarino λ

The next function I will have to implement after implementing some middlewares and with w.locals did you mean app.locals, or res.locals?

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Kev

yep. I mentioned w.locals since you used w instead of res as the variable name. Maybe I will raise a pr. What do you think about starting a slack/discord?

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Bruno Ciccarino λ

I just created a discord channel, if you want to join, this is the link: discord

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iGEORGE17

You built your own framework 😯. Respect man 🙌

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Bruno Ciccarino λ

Thanks bro, it was really fun to do, now I want to improve it more and more.

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Aaron Kofi Gayi

I love stuffs like this but what happened to GoFiber?

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Bruno Ciccarino λ

Gofiber is cool, but I thought it would also be cool for me to make my own to learn lol Gofiber is much more complex than mine...

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Aditya

Great stuff, we built a set of tools and HTTP router is one such module in our open source library - golly
Do check it out Repository Link
HTTP Router Link
A simple and quick implementation!

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Bruno Ciccarino λ

I left a ⭐, congratulations on the project, really cool.

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Adesoji1

Beautiful, thank you for making me contribute to the project, I will do more

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Bruno Ciccarino λ

I thank you for contributing, your help is very important.

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SKR3AM

Thanks for doing what Rob Pike never did for us.

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Adesoji1

He could too, prolly he isn't interested in express js

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Bruno Ciccarino λ

😂😂😂😂

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honzakadlec

Have you checked github.com/gin-gonic/gin ?

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Bruno Ciccarino λ

I had never seen it before, but now I opened the repository, it's pretty cool.