[newusertoday]

you can go quite far with golang without needing any other library/framework with just std library which means less dependencies and lesser things to worry about in case of maintaining your code base, upgrading it with newere go version and ease of operation(since it is single executable). Some of the basic things that you need that don't require frameworks are 1. http/https 2. authentication 3. sending mails 4. templating(it isn't powerful but you get by) 5. background jobs 6. date/time etc.

I am not familiar with ruby but my understanding is you don't get these out of the box you will need framework like rails for it. How easy/difficult it is to upgrade rails? for golang if you are sticking to stdlib it is trivial. If it is easy to upgrade/maintain/operate rails and you are familiar with it than don't switch.

[ryanbrunner]

Upgrading Rails itself has been relatively simple for at least the last few versions. Between Rails 2 and Rails 4 upgrades were very painful, but that's settled down significantly. You won't necessarily get the new features available with new versions, but especially recently things tend to stay fairly backwards compatible, and when functionality is removed it's almost always moved to a separate library that can just be included with little fuss.

Rails is also a fairly complete package, and you can get very far without additional libraries. Once you do start to bring in libraries it can get painful, particularly if you stray off the path of very popular libraries, but it's nowhere near the Javascript ecosystem.

You're right that Ruby itself won't get you far in terms of a webserver, but the vast majority of web development is done with Rails so in that context it's analogous to thinking of Rails as almost part of stdlib when thinking about web development specifically.