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Comment by chpmrc | Hacker News Reader

This is just a wrapper for SQL, every language has one. The same is true for GraphQL, I've never written a GraphQL scema or query by hand, always used a good wrapper that handled all the type safety I needed. Constructing GQL queries manually is the equivalent of doing it with SQL.

At this point I'm pretty sure you're conflating the underlying technology with what a wrapper could do on top of it. And in that regard I absolutely agree with you: raw GraphQL doesn't make any sense, the same way raw SQL (in 2022) doesn't make sense either.

EDIT (mandatory before I get lynched lol): except in cases where the wrapper builds a query that is inefficient or should be tweaked manually.

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> I've never written a GraphQL scema or query by hand, always used a good wrapper

Could you give me an example of a good client wrapper that doesn't require you to write queries as strings?

Not sure if you consider it "good" but I've used this one quite successfully: https://ghostdogpr.github.io/caliban/docs/client.html#query-...

Its a reasonable looking wrapper. Could benefit from the ability to build queries with variables, although not sure if that would be useful in the Scala ecosystem.

To make it clear, I disagree I'm conflating things. I'm currently working on a TypeScript based graphql builder (https://typed-graphql-builder.spion.dev/) and I can think of several ways the language could've been designed to make it easier to write typed query builders.

This is not without consequences - since its quite hard to write the builder, most tools available for code generation (https://www.graphql-code-generator.com/) are built around editing GraphQL strings and will try to find them in your code and add type assertions. Additionally the rest of the ecosystem tools are built around supporting this workflow (graphql playgrund, etc)

> I can think of several ways the language could've been designed to make it easier to write typed query builders.

Would you like to share them? Have you tried submitting your suggestions to the GraphQL core team?

Even if I did share them, its too late for GraphQL to make that change - they are design decisions and people probably already rely on them

Here is a few:

- Less fine-grained field selection - allow for fields selected by default. This would remove some of the need for optionals in languages that aren't able to dynamically create record types on the fly

- Implicit unions and union queries are really annoying to model in both OOP and FP languages. In FP disjoint tagged unions with no inheritance would work better; in OOP common interfaces but no ability to define unions would work better. As it stands, the mix makes it difficult on both language types to support a general schema. Unions based on optional fields (like in GRPC) are probably best-of-both-worlds here.

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