Before Go-Up, I used to use Viper. Viper is great and I surely recommend it; nevertheless, all of its features are not for free. In fact, it adds tons of dependencies that make the application much heavier.

So, if like me you aspire to code which is as light as possible and you can live with a smaller set of features (BWT go-up has some unique aces in the hole like recursive placeholders resolution!), then you should probably take into account a lighter alternative like go-up.

To show the impact that a single library can have on your application, I created three small examples, these are:

• go-up : a Go application that, using go-up, reads "Hello World" from a config file and prints it
• plain : a Go application that prints "Hello World"
• viper : a Go application that, using viper, reads "Hello World" from a config file and prints it

When built, they produce surprising results:

The Viper based binary file is nearly 6 times bigger than the other implementations!

(Build performed with go1.13 linux/amd64 on Ubuntu 18.04)