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Zinc

Guide

Benchmarks

How Zinc performs against Gin, Echo, and Chi, where it wins and loses, and how to run the suite yourself.

Zinc keeps its benchmark suite in the repository, so every performance claim can be checked against the code that produced it. Each framework does the same work through its own idiomatic API, in process, with no network in the way.

Latest results

Section titled “Latest results”

Latest Zinc run: 25 September 2026, Apple M1 Pro, go1.27.1, commit 42e11d2. Gin, Echo, and Chi samples are reused from 24 September. These mixed-date figures are an indicative snapshot; close results need a contemporaneous rerun. Lower is better.

Framework Fastest in
Zinc 60 of 77
Gin 12 of 77
Chi 3 of 77
Echo 2 of 77

Zinc was fastest, or within 2% of the fastest, in 64 rows. The 77-scenario score is a useful comparison, not a release threshold. Common string-response routing paths allocate 16 B and one object per request with the hardened response-header ownership.

Benchmark Zinc Gin Echo Chi
Hello world 86.75 136.9 152.9 180.8
Route parameter 114.2 143.9 159.1 348.1
Middleware chain 242.8 522.5 326.2 893.2
JSON response 568.2 596.3 577.2 665.8
API happy path 1,078.5 3,292 1,548.5 1,912.5
Parallel route parameter 40.05 55.91 49.04 301.5

Times are nanoseconds per operation.

Where Zinc is not fastest

Section titled “Where Zinc is not fastest”
  • Not found and method mismatch. Gin answers several misses faster, including NotFound at 60.03 ns against Zinc’s 107.7 ns. The large-route-set method mismatch is 91.81 ns for Gin against 106.4 ns for Zinc.
  • Route registration. Gin wins RouteRegistrationParam by 10%; Chi wins two scenario route-set builds. Registration happens at startup.
  • Query parameters. Echo wins QueryParams by 3.2%.
  • Static files. Gin answers a missing file at 1,022 ns against Zinc’s 1,587.5 ns; Chi is narrowly faster on a file hit.

Run it yourself

Section titled “Run it yourself”
Terminal window
git clone https://github.com/0mjs/zinc
cd zinc/benchmarks
GOTOOLCHAIN=go1.27.1 go test -run='^$' -bench=. -benchmem -count=10 -benchtime=100ms | tee results.txt

Results depend on the machine. Compare runs with benchstat rather than trusting a single sample.

The full report lists all 77 rows, including the percentage Zinc trails the winner in each loss. The separate Gin routing-suite report covers 16 router-focused workloads measured together on 25 September; its scores are not part of the 77.