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by junon 977 days ago
There are many, many frameworks for IPC/RPC or even REST that have human-readable schemas.

GraphQL is a performance nightmare, and while it might have nice and flashy dev tooling, it's fundamentally unoptimizable without extensive development investment - something that isn't an issue with REST.

2 comments

> GraphQL is a performance nightmare, and while it might have nice and flashy dev tooling, it's fundamentally unoptimizable without extensive development investment - something that isn't an issue with REST.

That feels really true. I worked on a really large gql api, and it was a performance nightmare, lots of 10+ second queries that thrashed our database.

Fine grained security was a nightmare. We found no existing solutions, and rolled a few different solutions for this that were all awful and leaky. Eventually we threw a bunch of money at h1 to tease it all out.

Citations very much needed for REST. JsonSchema is not human readable. Some RPC yes but their support on web tech is meh (grpc-web for example is a mess).

Having written large code bases in graphql I really disagree with this statement. It is just a different mindset and I like it. It does make you think way more in terms of data and their relations instead of endpoints. Sure you might get N+1 problems but its easy to mitigate and I prefer doing that on the backend instead of the frontend doing those calls.