Reasons for a framework

Due to the minimalist implementations within the net/http package, classic web application paradigms that developers have been employing for years in the industry are noticeably absent. This is not an oversight by the creators of the net/http package, but rather a feature. By keeping the functionality of the package stripped of higher level functionality, the developer building a web application has the flexibility to build solutions that fit their particular use cases.

This minimalism-based mindset does cause work for developers, in that higher level functionality must be built into the web application itself. An example would be middleware and request pipeline processing. This is common in many web application frameworks, and request pipelines have been implemented in a plethora of ways by various projects, all motivated by different priorities. Another example would be URL routing to handlers. Though an implementation exists in the standard library, it has been shown in the industry that the current embodiment within the net/http package is lacking in functionality for the majority of common use cases. Moreover, there are no helpers for common problems such as encoding and rendering responses, or binding request inputs to variables within a handler. Lastly, up until very recently, the net/http package did not have a mechanism by which request context could be kept throughout the request's lifetime.