Hey Go community 👋

If you’ve ever felt that:

• Gin is great but the custom context wrapping makes things leak into your business logic
• Chi is beautifully minimal but you end up pulling in 5–10 extra middleware packages anyway
• You just want something clean, fast, and zero external dependencies

…then I built Marten exactly for that feeling.

What is Marten?

Marten is a minimalist Go web framework with one core philosophy:

"The framework you reach for when you want nothing in the way."

It gives you:

• Ergonomic handler helpers (c.JSON, c.Bind, c.Param, c.Query, etc.)

• Full stdlib compatibility – real context.Context is untouched at c.Request.Context()

• Zero external dependencies – just net/http + Go stdlib

• Built-in production middleware suite (no extra imports needed):

• gzip compression (with pooling)

• CORS (configurable, secure wildcard handling)

• Secure headers (HSTS, XSS-Protection, CSP, etc.)

• Rate limiting

• Timeout

• Body limit

• Basic auth

• Request ID

• No-cache

• ETag

• Panic recovery

• Logger

All applied via clean global/group/route-level chaining.

Quick Hello World

package main

import "github.com/gomarten/marten"

func main() {
app := marten.New()

app.GET("/", func(c *marten.Ctx) error {
return c.JSON(200, map[string]string{"message": "Hello from Marten! 🚀"})
})

// Add middleware in one line
app.Use(marten.Middleware.Recover, marten.Middleware.Logger, marten.Middleware.Compress())

app.Run(":8080")
}

Why Another Framework?

Because sometimes you want:

• Gin-like productivity without the custom context baggage
• Chi-like purity with more batteries included
• The confidence that your app will compile and behave the same 5 years from now (no dependency hell)

Try It Out

go get github.com/gomarten/marten

Repo: https://github.com/gomarten/marten

Docs & examples are still growing, but the code is small (~2k LOC) and very easy to read.

Would love to hear your thoughts:

• Do you prefer zero deps even if it means slightly more explicit code?
• What’s your current favorite Go web stack in 2026?

Happy coding! 🐾