RedwoodJS has been about long term maintainability from the very beginning. This is part of why we chose GraphQL as a core component. It's more complex at first, but in the long run it gives you multi-client capabilities without rewriting your backend, and provides excellent separation of concerns. We still try to make Redwood as easy to get started with as possible, but in the tradeoff between "quick bootstrapping" and "long term maintainability", we tend to choose the latter.

That's definitely a valid view, but I'd say it's not the only one.

For some usecases, quick bootsrapping is incredibly valuable - eg an early-stage startup.

That was the historical case for Rails: quick to get started and not too bad to maintain/expand as you grow (it got better about later stages in the later years as the ecosystem matured). That's a tradeoff that can make a ton of sense when you're starting a project that has a good chance of not existing in 6 months and where every day of initial productivity is incredibly valuable.

Very cool, thank you!

Thank you for the reply. This is an interesting topic. I think at the core a comparison to Next is still apples to oranges imho and unnecessary here. But that's probably a distraction from the concepts at hand.

> Are they making simple spelling changes? Are they making changes to core languages (i.e. Typescript vs Markdown, etc.)? Are they adding a lot of new code and so forth.

I think what you're trying to get at here is answering the question, "Is PR A of greater quality or value than PR B?" I've decided that doesn't matter as much as:

- How easy is it for anyone to open and merge a PR of any kind?

- Once someone opens a PR, do they open another?

- What's the preexisting skill level of someone opening a PR relative to the difficulty of the PR they're attempting?

Trends. Over time. I can't tell you how many contributors start with simple doc updates (which, by the way, are as important as code for the Redwood community) and then follow up with a monster PR. Momentum builds momomentum. Collaboration leads to more collaboration. For the most part, "is A better than B?" is a distraction.

Again, all from my experience and not demonstrable otherwise.

> 4 months for both Next and Redwood and as it currently stands Redwood had 55 unique contributors and Next had 210

One of the reasons this likely feels low to me (in the case of # of Redwood contribs) is that we separate concerns across repos. Is this for the org or the repo?

It would be impossible to find an accurate number, but I'd be much more interested in the ratio of (unique contributors) / (project installations or downloads) and how that ratio trends over time.

For a metric like that, how might the Redwood vs. Next comparison play out?

;)