[mattgreenrocks]

Yep. The ORM situation in JS is not great. There’s no one go-to, and it seems like the question often prompts a patronizing response about how ORMs aren't really necessary. Kysely is really great, but it’s not an ORM.

My take: the JS ecosystem tends to avoid abstraction for whatever reason. Example: they don’t believe that their web framework should transparently validate that the form submission has the correct shape because that’s too magical. Instead the Right Way is to learn a DSL (such as Zod) to describe the shape of the input, then manually write the code to check it. Every single time. Oh and you can’t write a TS type to do that because Reasons. It all comes off as willful ignorance of literally a decade or more of established platforms such as Rails/Spring/ASP.NET. All they had to do was steal the good ideas. But I suspect the cardinal sin of those frameworks was that they were no longer cool.

I have a hard time relaying this without sounding too negative. I tried to get into SSR webdev with TS and kept an open mind about it. But the necessary ingredients for me weren’t there. It’s a shame because Vite is such a pleasure to develop with.

[actsasbuffoon]

The curse of being an experienced developer is watching good things go away, and then get re-invented and everyone hails them as a major innovation without any awareness that this has existed for a long time.

Someone will steal the good ideas eventually. And everyone will act like it’s the first time this idea has ever come up. I’ve seen it happen a few times now, and each time it makes me feel ancient.

[bombela]

It's happening for me too often the older I get. I remember reading the seniors of my days complaining about it. I guess it's my turn now...

As a side effect this reminds me how much I must not know what I don't know. It's a bit scary.

[esperent]

> There’s no one go-to

I thought Prisma.js was the most popular by far? It's the one I've always seen used in docs and examples.

[DangitBobby]

Yes it's pretty good though it falls short of my golden standard (Django) by missing good automatic migrations and transactions in migrations.

[TranquilMarmot]

We had to write a migration layer on top of Prisma that can run arbitrary code to do things like transactions in migrations. Kind of a bummer that something like that's not built-in to the system but it was also trivial to put together.

[welder]

Not anymore, now it's Drizzle

[switch007]

lol and next year it'll be something else. Drizzle isn't even 1.x

[stephen]

Well, we're not the "go to" yet :-) but if you want an entity-based ORM that isn't just a query builder, Joist has several amazing features (no N+1s) and great ergonomics https://joist-orm.io/

[k4rli]

What's wrong with TypeORM (besides being javascript of course)? Works alright, creates migrations based on entities automatically, and I really haven't had any issues with it. Even having several different dbs in the same project is straightforward.

[welder]

The go-to is Drizzle

[TranquilMarmot]

That's funny, I would say the go-to is Prisma. We use it heavily and have not had any issues.

[switch007]

Very lucky to not have encountered one of the 500 open and confirmed bugs!

[TranquilMarmot]

A project suffering from success. The more usage, the more edge cases you'll find and the more bug reports.

[welder]

I've used both and Drizzle has become the goto now in the TS community.

[TranquilMarmot]

I'll try it out next time I need to build something.

Where I work, as an org, we have gone all-in on Prisma across dozens of projects so getting buy-in to try something else will be an uphill battle.

[switch007]

When not even 1.x?