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Comment by halfmatthalfcat | Hacker News Reader

So does that make GraphQL the best then? JSON + faster/less data over the wire.

Not when you count the DX of the backend developers. Good luck making a performant GraphQL backend that doesn't suffer the N+1 problem, and have fun whitelisting the GraphQL queries produced by your frontend, because attackers will be supplying their own queries with no regards to performance.

Best experience I had with GraphQL was a B2B app where we had a fair amount of users, as well as the "backoffice" app also powered by GraphQL. Bad users we could just ban (the user base were great folks but could barely operate a computer, so it was fine).

Backend was with Absinthe+Elixir, so it was great (if I had to do it again today I would instead use Liveview, this was in 2017 where I had to retrofit a React app into something useable).

Public user facing is a different story, the last major one I saw was Tableau, though they are also business facing where they can just ban bad users. Github also has deprecated their GraphQL endpoints[0].

[0] https://github.blog/changelog/2022-08-18-deprecation-notice-...

Re: GitHub, that deprecation notice appears to be for GitHub Packages specifically. I don't see a deprecation notice on the general API: https://docs.github.com/en/graphql

> Bad users we could just ban

To be fair, it sounds like that would just make the DX wonderful no matter which stack you were using?

GraphQL has a DataLoader (to avoid N+1) and query complexity utilities to avoid those issues.

I know. Good luck implementing it performantly while also considering filtering, pagination, etc. It's doable of course, just not nearly as easy as people like to make it sound.

GraphQL isn’t magically faster. The equivalent endpoint in rest will be faster as you won’t need to translate the query to your backend persistence. GraphQLs benefits are not execution speed.

> JSON + faster

Only if you have a very competent backend team, who, apart from dataloader, will have to figure out caching.

> /less data

Graphql responses tend to be pretty deeply nested.

Apollo's Federation makes caching much easier to reason about as you can now selectively cache sub-query pieces at the service level for that specific responsible subgraph.

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