Actually I think Convex team are right, synchronous functions or database views would be huge improvement to Firebase.

Firebase Functions are asynchronous, and can be reordered relative to DB operations. They would be much more powerful if synchronous and on the wrtie path (so you could put auth logic in them instead of being forced to use the bespoke security language).

Firebase functions are at-least-once though, so they are pretty good but could be better.

Absolutely. But if you decide to use Cloud Functions with Firebase you have to give up the reactivity and automatic optimistic updates that Firebase normally provides.

Part of the difficulty of writing about Firebase is that it's actually a whole collection of tools with a host of complex tradeoffs. But that's also a lot of the difficulty in using it as well! Understanding when to use Cloud Firestore vs Realtime Database and when to load data directly vs via Cloud Functions are all complex questions with unclear answers.

To be clear, I think it's great for Firebase to have competition (same feeling as e.g., supabase). But the "you can only load documents" argument doesn't seem technically correct to me.

Except for maybe in the sense that convex is built on functions from day one so the docs and platform will lead you there by default rather than loading the documents which is non-optimal.

But that's a different argument than:

> With Cloud Firestore, the client interacts with its data by loading documents straight from the database.