They all have issues - sure - but I've never encountered one so likely to break so spectacularly. Then again, it feels like ActiveRecord is a more complex beast than most others I've used.

I've mostly used Hibernate and NHibernate, and SQLAlchemy a few years ago.

What would be some potential alternatives?

To rails? Thousands- so much depends on what exactly you need.

  Python? Django, Tornado, Twisted, etc
  Go? "net/http" + Gorilla (http://www.gorillatoolkit.org/)
  Java? JSF 2.0, GWT, Spring, Tapestry, etc etc
  C#? ASP.NET MVC

This list could be almost infinite... or at least could be discussed infinity :)

Any suggestion that implies Golang + Gorilla is comparable to Rails is poorly informed (and I really like Golang).

"You know what you could do instead of using Rails? Implement your own ad-hoc version of 60% of Rails!"

I don't think that is fair; I did say "so much depends on what exactly you need."

Maybe you don't need to whole kitchen sink. Also its not as though there are not other Go libraries to get other functionality from such as DB/ORM functionality.

What's a good Golang ORM that you could use in a production app?

If people want something like Rails in Golang, it probably makes more sense to point them at Revel. Gorilla is more like Sinatra, for better or for worse.

Yeah, I don't think Gorilla or Revel are quite mature or stable enough at this point to consider as a Rails replacement. And I'm speaking as a (extremely minor) Revel contributor - it's still very young, early adopters only!

Web years are a little bit like dog years. I feel like Revel will grow up fast.

For the record, I have written some Go, but not worked on Revel specifically.

I've started a side-project using Go + Gorilla. It's actually very nice, but I don't think it's quite as productive for the early-stage as Rails is.

I can certainly recommend Django - I've been working with a large-ish Django codebase for 3 years and have yet to see a security vulnerability as bad as the ones Rails seems to have every month.

ASP.NET MVC works pretty well these days. It's open-ish source as well, as in you don't need to pay to deploy it on Mono.

I've used it with NHibernate for the ORM and Postgres.

And don't forget the Web API http://www.asp.net/web-api

OCaml [1]

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2235204

Play framework, Grails, Node, Django, Revel...

While fully realising that the language itself is pretty terrible, Java + Spring + JavaMail is a pretty good framework and as a bonus involves minimal XML these days.

I'm sure one of the alternative JVM languages would make this setup tolerable to work with, even pleasurable, but I don't know them.

Django?

Sinatra and Padrino are some of the more common Ruby alternatives, especially for smaller sites.

google app engine (based on python)

Mojolicious - http://mojolicio.us

Symfony2