That's definitely not conservative. Maybe you don't know what a conservative attitude about libraries is because you've never seen one. Your original comment:

That's definitely not conservative. Maybe you don't know what a conservative attitude about libraries is because you've never seen one. Your original comment: > You can be conservative about adding dependencies and still end up with hundreds No. Just no. If you have hundreds of dependencies, you are by definition not conservative about adding dependencies. > Database driver About the only legit thing on the list. > database utilities Not needed. > gRPC framework Not needed. > monitoring & metrics Not needed. > CLI & configuration tools NOT NEEDED! .. etc. > Drop any item on that list and you are either losing capabilities or have more software to implement yourself What are you losing by not using grpc? You can do a lot of things by just using the builtin rpc package or the encoding/gob with the http package. Being conservative about adding dependencies means resisting the urge to add them and figuring out a way to do without them. Every dependency you add is a potential point of failure and headaches. Just like every layer of abstraction you create. The cost for dependencies is huge, so every dependency has to justify itself by giving such a huge benefits that it's worth the cost. > Cobra Do you need a special library to handle command line arguments? How complex is your CLI interface? How many commands and sub commands do you have? 10? 20? It's trivial to handle that much manually using the builtin libraries. > Viper How hard is it to just read a json file using builtin libraries? How much do you lose by not using "Viper" or whatever? How many times will you have to read config files? One time when the app launches? Does not justify adding a dependency. > it is certainly tempting to reimplement things like Cobra, Viper, sqlx, prometheus end point, and everyone knows we should all implement our own crypto You don't even need to re-implement anything. Just do the simplest thing that works using the standard library. You know the standard library comes with a crypto package, right? The mindset you are presenting is the exact opposite of conservative. You are just grabbing every library that you think can save you 20 lines of code.