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Comment by jddil | Hacker News Reader

You haven't actually described any of the unique parts of GraphQL though. Generating a typesafe API whose schema is defined in a single place is trivial with an OpenApi spec and a client generator

What I've noticed is people get their first taste of a type safe api and automatic client creation via GraphQL and don't understand that exists without it.

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> What I've noticed is people get their first taste of a type safe api and automatic client creation via GraphQL and don't understand that exists without it.

I mean, yes, you can technically write any project in C if you're smart and dedicated enough, but data scientists still use Python because it's easier to work with for the things they need to do. The fact that GraphQL is inherently safe, while REST is inherently not, is why people like GraphQL. OpenAPI is hardly the standard in Rest APIs.

I think it is the other way around. REST inherently only offers, what routes you implement, nothing more. In that sense it is "safe". There are frameworks like "Rocket" in Rust, which make things typesafe from the moment a request arrives at your route's handler. While GraphQL requires you to implement who can access what, because you allow the frontend a lot of freedom to formulate queries. This is inherently unsafe.

Perhaps we are talking about different kinds of "safety" or "aspects of safety"?

no I'm just wrong, sorry!

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