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Comment by KyeRussell | Hacker News Reader

Amen. Until recently, I was exclusively working with Django for 5+ years. I definitely fell into the trap of making the ORM for granted. Had a brief foray into the JS world and despite plenty of slick-looking projects with fancy pants websites, nothing remotely compares.

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Same here, I came into a project that had been started months before and found that they were spending weeks reimplementing stuff that comes out of the box in Django. But not as well.

What JS based ORMs did you use that you weren't a fan of?

All of them are bad in their own ways. They all fall down in key features, or the non-standard SQL features (hooks, after-save, automatic transactions, etc) all have edge-cases and surprising behaviour.

I have tried a lot and the least worst is Zapatos (and it's not really an ORM) because it at least tries to not paper over SQL and instead just creates a type-safe API for using SQL.

Slightly related, I'm not used to using ORMs. Spoiled by jooq from the JVM world, writing SQL with the query builder in TypeORM was a terrible experience.

The thing is - even if someone creates an amazing ORM for Node, I doubt I'd use it. I am tired and done with async everything. No more NodeJS for business logic.

Now, if someone could create a Django-like ORM for Java or Rust, then we're talking. Hibernate and Diesel are nowhere near Django's ORM in terms of productivity and "it just works" factor. Go's GORM looks pretty good but haven't tried it. jooq does not look as easy to use or setup, and the workflow is entirely different.

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