I tried Ent again… I know I said that I was done with ORMs, but people were telling me that it shouldn’t be that bad, so I gave it another chance. Again with Ent, because I feel like it’s the only ORM that has a chance to work with everything I want to use it for. And up to now, it is still holding up, it hasn’t been a blocker yet for this project. Performance is fine, of course there is overhead but nothing major (unlike SQLAlchemy, which halves your performance…). It can now handle many-to-many relations with custom join tables without a problem. I was also able to change some codegen that I didn’t like (omitempty on boolean fields) using a codegen hook, and add a runtime hook for some custom row-level validation (see codeblock). The function signature of the hooks takes some getting used to, but as long as it works, it’s fine by me. I also like the bulk insert API, it is really flexible. So overall I am happily using it but I am staying watchful about any possible limitations.

func (Image) Hooks() []ent.Hook {
	return []ent.Hook{
		hook.On(
			func(next ent.Mutator) ent.Mutator {
				return hook.ImageFunc(
					func(ctx context.Context, m *gen.ImageMutation) (
						ent.Value, error) {
						_, hasRelease := m.ReleaseID()
						_, hasArtist := m.ArtistID()
						if hasRelease == hasArtist {
							if hasRelease {
								return nil, fmt.Errorf("but both were provided")
							} else {
								return nil, fmt.Errorf("neither was provided")
							}
						}
						return next.Mutate(ctx, m)
					})
			},
			ent.OpCreate|ent.OpUpdate|ent.OpUpdateOne,
		),
	}
}