go-reform

reform

Go2016–2021

go-reform / reform

reform

A better ORM for Go, based on non-empty interfaces and code generation.

Data & Databases Developer Tools

Explore on GitHub Read Hacker News discussions

4Distinct people

6Mentions

1Explicit recommenders

1.5KGitHub stars

REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

A better ORM for Go, based on non-empty interfaces and code generation.

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

> I just want my SQL back. It's a language everyone understands, it's been around since the seventies, and it's reasonably standardized. It's easy to read, and can be used by…

dgellow used a recommendation phrase. One indexed comment matches. This is a phrase match, not a verdict.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

No other repository is repeatedly linked in the same discussions.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 5:04:57 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year6 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2016-05-19 16:08:56 UTC to 2021-03-10 12:47:02 UTC.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges

UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
Period	Start (UTC)	End (exclusive, UTC)	Mentions	Submissions	Comments
2016	2016-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	5	2	3
2017	2017-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0	0
2018	2018-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0	0
2019	2019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0	0
2020	2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	0	0	0
2021	2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC	1	0	1

What Hacker News says

6 sources

dgellow·Mar 10, 2021Recommendation phrase

> I just want my SQL back. It's a language everyone understands, it's been around since the seventies, and it's reasonably standardized. It's easy to read, and can be used by anyone, from business people to engineers. I rely a lot on SQL and in general advocate for it, but that’s too simplistic of a view IMHO. SQL makes it easy to write and read simple queries, and ridiculously complicated and arcane to write slightly more complex logic. More than once I’ve been asked to help fix giant SQL queries written by a business or analytics team and that’s a terrible experience. Also, the tooling around SQL is often terrible and almost didn’t evolve during the past 15+ years. SQL queries from another programming language without an ORM means that you do everything by manipulating strings by hand, with zero type safety. Edit: My favorite library i

Read the rest

n Go is reform, a generator that generates types and implement the Scanner/Valuer interfaces. You annotate your structs, generate the types, add the generates files to git, done. That way you have very limited ORM magic but gain some type safety. And you still have complete control over your SQL queries (which is often frustrating to do with classic ORMs). https://github.com/go-reform/reform Edit 2: the most promising ORM I’ve seen is Prisma, https://www.prisma.io/. I haven’t tried yet, I’m still quite attached to writing most of my SQL by hand because that’s what I know well, but their pitch seems good to me.

In I don't want to learn your query language (2018)

aarondl0·Dec 15, 2016

I want to see the Go community and it's libraries flourish. But having libraries like this around which provide extra confusing and probably poorly maintained choices for users is detrimental to it's overall health. There's already great examples of maintenance rot found even amongst the very popular libraries like go-yaml and httprouter. One thing you can say about Go is it has 1000 Micro-frameworks, ORMs, Routers, and Logging libraries. Most of them are within a percent of giving the exact same feature set with the exact same approach and and ever so slightly different API. Lots of them share the same mistakes as they are a user's first project or a learning arena (though routing has been a pretty benchmarked area so that's been better than the others). As someone who has open source libraries, and who uses Go in their day job and at ho

Read the rest

me my personal opinion is that Go needs fewer, stronger libraries. Well supported, well maintained pieces rather than this illusion of choice that's presented today. I'm sorry if I came off as crass in my reply to the OP but that's simply the state I see in the community today. Ideally there'd be 2-4 ORMs in Go that would be the goto. And half would use a code-generation approach, half would use the reflection based approach. https://github.com/astaxie/beego/tree/master/orm https://github.com/cosiner/gomodel https://github.com/jinzhu/gorm https://github.com/go-gorp/gorp https://github.com/coocood/qbs https://github.com/go-reform/reform https://github.com/vattle/sqlboiler https://github.com/upper/db https://github.com/astaxie/beedb https://github.com/naoina/genmai https://github.com/monochromegane/argen https://github.com/square/squalor https://github.com/theduke/go-dukedb https://github.com/dropbox/godropbox/tree/master/database/sq... (...and more) And now: https://github.com/samonzeweb/godb Do we truly need this? This one in particular feels a lot like upperdb. And if it's for learning only, don't publish it to things like hackers news which makes people seem like it's something you should use as opposed to the more mature libraries out there. This is what I meant by fragmentation, it's an illusion of choice. There are actually very few logging/routing/orm/micro-framework libraries you should really use if you're serious about a project.

In Show HN: Godb is a simple Go ORM for PostgreSQL, MySQL, SQLite and SQL Server

aleksi·Nov 10, 2016

Also see https://github.com/go-reform/reform for a stable implementation of a similar idea.

In Seven years of Go

aleksi·Nov 10, 2016

That's why we created https://github.com/go-reform/reform. It gives you type-safe (without interface{}) helpers for both common cases and reading custom query results.

In Seven years of Go

kristianp·May 20, 2016Submission

A better ORM for Go, based on non-empty interfaces and code generation

1 points · Open discussion

aleksi·May 19, 2016Submission

reform: a better ORM for Go, based on non-empty interfaces and code generation

5 points · Open discussion