I can already hear the Go purists sharpening their pitchforks. “Use the standard library,” they chant. “Frameworks are anti-pattern,” they scream.

I don’t care.

I am not using Fiber because I am lazy. I am not using it because it looks like Express.js. I am using it because I have a pathological addiction to speed, and net/http, bless its safe, compatible heart, is simply too polite for the violence I want to inflict on my CPU.

The “Standard” Bottleneck

The Go standard library is fantastic. It is robust. It is HTTP/2 compatible. But it is also designed to be “safe” and general-purpose. It allocates memory like it’s free. Every request creates new objects, new buffers, generating work for the Garbage Collector.

In my world, the Garbage Collector is the enemy. Every millisecond the CPU spends sweeping up your mess is a millisecond it isn’t serving a request.

Enter Fasthttp

Fiber isn’t just a wrapper, it’s an implementation of fasthttp.

For those who don’t know, fasthttp is the rebellious cousin of net/http. It cheats. It uses worker pools. It reuses objects aggressively. It performs zero memory allocation in hot paths.

It essentially tells the Garbage Collector to take a coffee break because there is nothing to clean up.

Does it break some HTTP edge-case compliances? Yes. Does it use unsafe pointers? Absolutely. Does it handle 10x more requests per second than the standard library? You bet it does.

Zero Allocation is King

Look at this. This isn’t about syntax sugar, it’s about raw efficiency.

app.Get("/", func(c *fiber.Ctx) error {
    return c.SendString("Hello, World!")
})

When this handler runs, Fiber doesn’t allocate a new string on the heap if it doesn’t have to. It reuses the context. It slices existing byte arrays. It treats memory as a scarce resource, not an infinite buffet.

So…

…I am a simple man. I see a benchmark graph bar go up, and my brain releases dopamine.

If you are building a banking API that needs to support every obscure HTTP header defined in 1999, use net/http. But if you want to saturate your network card before your CPU even wakes up, stop worrying about being “idiomatic” and start worrying about throughput.

Bits consume energy. Using more CPU cycles than necessary is morally offensive. Fiber respects the hardware.

See you in the next post.