a month ago
- The author returned to Spain without a plan after working on SDKs in San Francisco and building a social network called Fyve, which didn't succeed.
- Dissatisfied with the reflection-based complexity of the Martini framework, the author was inspired by Rob Pike's philosophy to create Gin, prioritizing simplicity over ease of use.
- Gin was designed as a middle ground between Martini's magic and net/http's lack of helpers, using an explicit *gin.Context object to handle common operations without reflection.
- The router in Gin uses a radix tree for efficient lookups, with fixed allocations and sync.Pool for performance, trading clever route patterns for speed and simplicity.
- Backward compatibility was a key constraint, ensuring that early programs still work after more than a decade, contributing to Gin's widespread adoption with over 290k dependent projects.
- After releasing Gin on Hacker News, the author eventually handed maintenance to others, viewing the project's independence and continuous improvement as a sign of its success.