wait, what? doesn't support joins? Things like this make me doubt my fundamentals. 'Are joins really necessary?' is the question now running through my mind ;-)

It does not support joins. The expectation is that you "Preload" your data which is a fancy way of saying load it all into memory. The performance of this is trash so don't use that ORM there are a few better ORMs for GO mentioned in the issue.

Yes joins are really necessary in SQL they are a foundational part of using any relational database.

Yes, they're literally the second thing one learns about SQL, really. I'm not being too serious about rethinking whether they're necessary, to be clear!

What a strange design decision though. I don't really understand why it is doing this? Why would anyone really think it's a good idea?

> I'm not being too serious about rethinking whether they're necessary, to be clear!

My apologies if I came off condescending, it's hard to impart tone of voice in text.

> I don't really understand why it is doing this?

I think it's because it makes the SQL Generation harder. I think the lib at the moment is simply a search and replace on a bunch of SQL strings.

Thankfully my team is making the switch from gorm to vanilla SQL. I joined the company a little over one year ago on another team that also uses it, and using gorm turned out to be a really pain. It was the first time I had to use an ORM, and I really disliked the experience & constant source of issues.