[faceyspacey]

The point is that Meteor will be handling the subscriptions side of things, the reactivity. There's a near-endless amount of work there to get it right. GraphQL and Relay don't even have an interface for subscriptions yet. The plan will likely be to make Meteor's actual concrete system work with the interface they provide by specifying a few lines of code. Facebook and React likely won't do much to address the implementation of subscriptions, which may very well be a larger undertaking than all of GraphQL itself.

In addition, what Meteor is about to build here is a long time coming. It's something they have been thinking about in one form or another for years. What I'm referring too is a purely webserver-based interface for subscriptions that doesn't take advantage of any special database features, and is therefore database-agnostic. GraphQL happens to come at the perfect time as the solution to supporting multiple databases. And as the only open source full stack reactive solution worth its salt, they know the challenges of building this solution better than anyone.

Their current solution, Oplog Tailing for Mongo, has been on the chopping block for a while since it doesn't scale far enough. They've experimented with PostgreSQL triggers. And now they're drawing from all this experience to harness GraphQL types to build the best-in-class interface for anyone to take on full stack reactivity. My guess is it will likely not be as performant as direct Mongo oplog tailing, but will allow developers to customize it to make it faster where you need it, which is something we've never been able to do. In addition, if the low level interface is good enough, it will likely result in many packages that provide for specific optimized reactive/subscription scenarios.

So no, the "React stack" has not "already won" on this front. Subscriptions is a big problem with many different solutions. Likely what Facebook has can't be used by anyone but the largest of companies. If Meteor both provides a decent database-agnostic subscriptions interface + an API to customize it for performance, Meteor will likely have done what nobody else has or is willing to do.