Go’s a great language, but every honest user would have to acknowledge that mistakes were made.

Along with time’s magic date of Mon Jan 2, 2006 and the database/sql package, some of the biggest are html/template and text/template. Runtime-checked only, nesting logic that defies explanation, necessitating custom helpers to do perform operations so basic as adding two numbers together, and some of the worst docs ever written.

I was glad to discover that someone’s trying to write an alternative: Templ. It produces a hierarchy of nested partial views similar to React apps, and generates Go code in a way reminiscent of sqlc.

I tried it on a toy project and got to something workable quickly. Templ’s fairly new and has rough edges:

• No line numbers in case of problems, making debugging difficult.

• No equivalent to Gofmt for *.templ files, so you’re back micromanaging whitespace and manually fixing imports.

• Lots of regenerating code on changes. There’s a subcommand that’ll watch the disk, regenerate, and restart a command, but your success in integrating with this will vary wildly.

Still, a lot to be optimistic about. Go’s viability for writing an HTML-based web app that’s sustainable is still very low, and it’d be great to see that change.