Have you ever read the source code for Microsoft's ilasm compared to Mono ilasm?
Anyway, EF is cool, but probably every .NET dev has an EF/LINQ performance related horror story (the generated queries are ridiculous).
A self compiling language is more impressive to me than ASP.NET MVC.
And C# is just lacking for what is actually capable in CIL bytecode. Or _was_ when I last used.
There have definitely been improvements, but in my opinion, they have just been kind of slow.
When I think of Microsoft's impact on .NET and it's culture, I think of stuff like SOAP, the SmtpClient, breaking changes in APIs every year and the technical debt left by it, the dogmatic fanboys, etc...
You could also bundle your JS. Or pretend like any number of other solutions like caching parsed ASTs exist instead of being as obtuse as possible, or something idk
Yes, but I think the point is practically every high level language can already do this pretty trivially.
If it's scripted you can typically just get a string representation of the function.
If it's Java, JAR inspection/dynamics have been a thing for a long time. And in other languages, they usually directly support metaprogramming (like Rust) and plugging code into the compilation logic.
It's just an API for JIT, basically metaprogramming. It's cool but you can definitely do a similar thing in pretty much every high level language.
With scripting languages, it's all JIT :)
The C# teams progress on this has been slow. Keep in mind the CIL bytecode has had such capabilities for at least 20 years now and only in the past like decade are we seeing more features and optimizations around LINQ and System.Reflection.Emit.
Dynamics were extremely slow in C# and if you look at the CIL generated you see why. It's possible for example to use something like a Haxe anonymous types[1] to optimize Dynamics so that CallSite caching is way more performant.
I am pretty sure in C# the only way to accept an anonymous type is as a dynamic value, so even though the type of the structure is well-defined at compile-time, it will still rely heavily on runtime reflection/DLR with no additional caching beyond what DLR does for any other dynamic type.
Anyways, this leads to niche libraries being built for handling dynamic data like JSON performantly.
Which leads to annoying things like .NET libraries/apps being incompatible (without some adapter) if they use for example, different JSON libraries under the hood. (See [2]).
Problems like these (the lack of actually good JIT/dynamic code support) in my opinion significantly slow down the .NET ecosystems development, that's why it always feels like .NET is just catching up with features other popular languages have.
To be fair though, much of C#'s lag is owed to Microsoft's contribution to .NET being mostly technical debt. Almost everything good that came out of .NET came from open source/non MS teams (like Mono).
this comment further confirms my belief that GraphQL is a cult.
> this completes the move from the server side to the client side
OK, how does that benefit end users, developers, or administrators? I have never had a person approach me to make a website with a client side database.
> REST (so called, see[1]) was the first step, GraphQL the second step and now this completes the move of pushing the expressiveness found on the server side over to the client side.
Again, I don't see the point..? Who does this benefit..? Front-end only devs who want think doing everything on the front end makes a website more modern/app-like..?
Web architectures aren't separated in front end/back end because of technological limitations. We could've been running databases in the browser for decades now. We don't because of Separation of Concerns...
The front end is for presentation tier logic.. the backend is for business logic.
Just because you can do something doesn't mean you _should_, and when something has been possible for a long time but hasn't been done very often, you should ask yourself why that is.
Of the 3 big US based clouds, Azure was the worst I dealt with. AWS comes close second to worst. GCP is the best UX but pricing is probably comparably crazy.
Azures biggest issue is it inherits most of the same technical debt most Microsoft products suffer from. It's slow, glitchy, and at times unforgiving. Also I find I often have to have the network tab open as errors aren't reported to the UI. They just happen and stuff hangs.
I really wonder how despite all of this, they still get business... It's been a demonstrably terrible Cloud from the start. Even Equifax avoided Azure during their lift and shift, which is surprising given a lot of their stack is super legacy Microsoft tech... I guess they learned their lesson.
I could be wrong but I think a good way to have an edge is pricing. Email is generally a low bandwidth service with lots of cold storage, yet for most personal email services the price doesn't seem to reflect this.
Like for example Google One is $2/100GB and $10 for 2TB yet you can definitely get storage much cheaper than this, and bandwidth is close to, if not free on bare metal clouds.
I've been considering this myself. That or some IRCv3 offering.
If you go the commercial route you'll almost certainly end up building an ERP/CRM, as it's what a lot of companies seem want: a personalized ERP/CRM (not sure why, though it does kind of feels like just outsourcing an IT dept whenever this has come up in the past)
So then your argument isn't that GraphQL is better than REST. It's that you need something specifically designed for graph based data access to handle graph based data access.
Which a REST API can do.
This argument is quite a goalpost shift from your original point: that it is easier to implement authz/access control in GraphQL than for a REST API.
An API to generate PDFs is not comparable to GraphQL, because it's not a Graph based data access API...
You're so disingenuous and unserious it's insane. This is why people hate GraphQL and it's devs: 100% of your talking points are non-sequitur copy paste arguments. It doesn't matter how much context is provided to prove what you're saying is nonsense — you'll just bulldoze right along with said nonsense anyways. It's like I'm talking with a zombie.
For the purpose of accountability I'm pointing out that so far you've:
- made an invalid comparison
- tried to elaborate on that comparison only to make several other logical errors
- goal post shifted to a totally different point than your original point after being called out
you've already pointed out that you have zero experience with JSON:API and that you can't come up with anything good to compare GraphQL with sort of demonstrates that your reasoning behind using it is not based on anything other than marketing as you have never actually used an alternative to GraphQL... Everything you've said I've only ever seen in GraphQL promo material.
So basically you got shilled and turned into a shiller.
> you don't have any guarantees about the API and thus it's a much harder target to support.
You won't find a developer worth hiring who thinks OpenAPIs are more difficult to work with than GraphQL.
Every REST API can be an OpenAPI
Practically every popular general purpose language has an OpenAPI client gen implementation.
And supporting a GraphQL API is not easier than supporting a REST API. All I have to do for my stopwatch API is handle one route.
> You're limiting it to json:api which is nice
Certain constraints do come with valid comparisons, comparing like things is a requirement of a valid pros/cons comparison, not a niceity.
It makes no sense to explain the pros of using one thing over an other when no one is thinking about using one thing as a replacement for another.
It's like talking about the pros/cons of using your proprietary web based chat platform vs. using UDP. Not using UDP for the chat or anything. Just comparing the chat with UDP itself, the whole protocol. No one considering your chat is going to step back and go "wait why am I using a web chat when I can just use UDP?"
> I have never even seen a company use that
My point isn't that a company does/doesn't use it. I mentioned JSON:API because it's a valid basis of comparison, no other reason.
> What happens in reality is that I get 20 apis from 20 teams, each of them completely different principle - and am supposed to build an universal auth layer for that. That's much more painful than in the companies that decided to go for GraphQL only.
But you have by your own admission never seen another company use JSON:API.. therefore you don't actually know that it is more painful than it would be for all REST APIs.
For all I know you could, again, be talking about my Stopwatch REST API... hence your comparison is invalid. By the way, auth is easier for my stopwatch API than it is for GraphQL. :)
GraphQL literally is a "federation gateway point."
It's literally meant to be a gateway to a bunch of different external systems working in federation.
It's the exact same scope if you used a RESTful graph based data access API that connected to external systems..
Outside all the GraphQL jargon and gobbledygook you'll see that GraphQL is not some groundbreaking, unique or foundational product... The concept of generating graph based data access APIs from schemas is probably older than the concept of phones that can send emails. The only "innovation" is the "query language"...
> That doesn't matter at all.
I honestly don't know why I'm taking this seriously. Yes, it matters, your entire point was a comparison.. that your comparison is foundationally invalid matters when assessing the validity of your entire argument..
> REST is a PITA for any data model that’s more complex than CRUD.
Also I'd just like to point out that for everything but queries themselves, GraphQL uses JSON. JSON is used in the C and U of GraphQL's CRUD... Explain to me why this couldn't have just been JSON and therefore a REST API again..?
Almost the only thing stopping it from being one is its "query language". I guess technically usage of one endpoint would make OpenAPI doc'ing difficult but I think possible depending on what JSON Schema/OpenAPI version you're using.
But it would also be trivial to just have separate endpoints for each schema.
You could even use all POST requests and only use the request body if you want.
If you don't need to write resolvers by hand, from experience I can tell you writing an OpenAPI over an ORM/ODM is trivial and will accomplish the same end. It's schema-first and quick and simple (it's as simple as defining the schema in your ORM library, your generator will handle the rest)
If you do need them, as you said it's going to be complex either way.
> With the right team, with the right use-case it's excellent. So please don't take it as GraphQL=bad.
If a framework requires you to be just as, if not more competent in its niches to achieve the same end you could've achieved without it, I think that makes it bad.
That's like if an HTTP framework could only be effective at the protocol level with a team competent in HTTP. The whole point of a framework is abstraction.
I have never once seen how GraphQL (the language) provides any sort of abstraction that the general framework itself doesn't, and the little abstraction GraphQL the framework does provide you can mostly sum up by just generating an OpenAPI over a set of schemas, with a whole host of benefits and few trade offs (on the implementation side, which is where your 10x devs usually live anyways).
It's weird. It's like the main benefit of GraphQL is that there are groups of developers who understand it, but the biggest drawback is that it is needlessly complex, which again, seems to indicate GraphQL is bad. It's an abstraction that creates needless complexity (that you necessarily can't reverse because it's apart of the spec..)
Because it was brought up as a subtopic in my original comment and someone quote responded directly to it.