[andrewingram]

As someone who’s used GraphQL since mid-2015, if you haven’t used GraphQL with Relay you probably haven’t experienced GraphQL in a way that truly exploits its strengths.

I say probably because in the last ~year Apollo shipped functionality (fragment masking) that brings it closer.

I stand by my oft-repeated statement that I don’t use Relay because I need a React GraphQL client, I use GraphQL because I really want to use Relay.

The irony is that I have a lot of grievances about Relay, it’s just that even with 10 years of alternatives, I still keep coming back to it.

[maxcan]

Can you elaborate? I've used URQL and Apollo with graphql code gen for type safety and am a big fan.

What about relay is so compelling for you? I'm not disagreeing, just genuinely curious since I've never really used it.

[andrewingram]

For me it’s really about the component-level experience.

* Relatively fine-grained re-rendering out of the box because you don’t pass the entire query response down the tree. useFragment is akin to a redux selector

* Plays nicely with suspense and the defer fragment, deferring a component subtree is very intuitive

* mutation updaters defined inline rather than in centralised config. This ended up being more important than expected, but having lived the reality of global cache config with our existing urql setup at my current job, I’m convinced the Relay approach is better.

* Useful helpers for pagination, refetchable fragments, etc

* No massive up-front representation of the entire schema needed to make the cache work properly. Each query/fragment has its own codegenned file that contains all the information needed to write to the cache efficiently. But because they’re distributed across the codebase, it plays well with bundle size for individual screens.

* Guardrails against reuse of fragments thanks to the eslint plugin. Fragments are written to define the data contract for individual components or functions, so there’s no need to share them around. Our existing urql codebase has a lot of “god fragments” which are very incredibly painful to work with.

Recent versions of Apollo have some of these things, but only Relay has the full suite. It’s really about trying to get the exact data a component needs with as little performance overhead as possible. It’s not perfect — it has some quite esoteric advanced parts and the documentation still sucks, but I haven’t yet found anything better.

Did my only ever podcast appearance about it a few years ago. Haven’t watched it myself because yikes, but people say it was pretty good https://youtu.be/aX60SmygzhY?si=J8rQF6Pe5RGdX1r8

[tcoff91]

Try gql tada it’s much better than graphQL codegen

[maxcan]

I did. I really wanted to like it. I think it broke due to something I was doing with fragments or splitting up code in my monorepo. I may give it a shot again, from first principles it is a better approach.