I'm going to chime in, since I've been using Go as my primary language for over a year, and I'm currently working on a major (production) Go project that others might see as well-suited for Rails (in fact, the early prototype was written in Rails[0])

> The thing no framework I have seen so far addresses is persistence. SQL persistence in Golang is a bit of a nightmare. It's raw SQL, and the database libraries are fussy.

> The thing that makes Rails so easy to write in, especially for newcomers, is ActiveRecord. As far as I can tell, nothing like it exists (in a stable form) for Golang.

I wouldn't recommend newcomers to Go use SQL right off the bat. Document-based storage (like CouchDB or MongoDB), or even key/value (Redis, etc.) is much more aligned with Go's concept of structs, and all three of those databases have strong library support in Go. If you're just looking to dabble in Go and just happen to need a database (and it doesn't matter which), I'd recommend playing around with those first. Even Neo4j works very well with Go, though as of January 2013 (when I last used it), the only Go library for Neo4j was third-party, and not very well-documented.

That said, once you know the Go language, using SQL (either with or without an ORM) is straightforward, if not as convenient as ActiveRecord. jmoiron has a good blog post[1] comparing the good, bad, and ugly of Go ORMs, so I won't try to top that here - rather, I'll share my experience.

(As pointed out elsewhere, ORMs are not universally liked as a general concept, so I'm writing this comparison assuming that one actually does want the features an ORM provides - naturally, if you prefer prepared SQL, Go already provides perfect support for that.)

Gorp is definitely not as "magical" as ActiveRecord, but it certainly does the job. A number of the ways in which it differs from ActiveRecord have more to do with the (strongly) static vs. dynamic difference in type systems, though some are specific to Go's architecture.

There are a few odd features here and there that are still missing (for example, I'm actually not sure if there's a wrapper function for "INSERT IF NOT EXISTS" yet, though it's not a huge bother).

I do end up spending more time thinking about the queries that I'm using, compared to Django or Rails. There is some additional verbosity - I have to write some helper functions that I wouldn't otherwise have to. On the other hand, I know exactly what queries are being executed at all times, so it's easy to identify potential bottlenecks.

In short - I agree that ActiveRecord is more convenient than anything that currently exists in Go. On the other hand, it's reasonably advanced enough that relative newcomers to the language[2] shouldn't have a problem with it. So far, the biggest bottleneck in development of this application has not been with the SQL bindings, even though it would be nice to spend a bit less time on that front.

It hasn't had as much time to develop and mature as ActiveRecord have, but those of us using it in production have accepted those tradeoffs.

[0] If you're wondering why we didn't continue it in Rails, we had to scrap the original codebase for a number of other reasons, so given that we weren't keeping any of the original code, there was no logical reason we needed to use the same language.

[1] http://jmoiron.net/blog/golang-orms/

[2] As opposed to newcomers to programming in general