If you measure productivity by how many features you can push in a week, Rails will probably win every time. I look at productivity in the long run. I have been

If you measure productivity by how many features you can push in a week, Rails will probably win every time. I look at productivity in the long run. I have been running this product for seven years now and there's a lot of legacy business logic and cruft. The Rails application was difficult to change (but easy to pump new things out). As the product matured, fewer new features were really needed so the edge Rails had was gone and all that was left was an application that was hard to change without breaking something. Go's edge came in and reduced the server's memory footprint and was easy to maintain and make changes. If the Go code compiled, I was confident it would work (I never felt that way with Rails). To answer your question directly: I didn't use any framework. My application only has two external dependencies: gorilla/securecookie (cookie encryption) and lib/pq (database driver for postgres). I could probably do without securecookie, but I was hesitant to do anything encryption related on my own. Everything else is standard library Go code.