24 replies

1. elle mundy 2 min later

   @zachleat i use it to load all data from strapi to 11ty in one http request 🙈

   1. Zach Leatherman 5 min later

      @exchgr a build step lets us get away with incredibly inefficient things on the backend and I love it for that

      1. elle mundy 7 min later

         @zachleat exactly lol. i justified it because it’s just doing one not-even-that-slow (yet 🫣) request to render every page on my 11ty site, which, due to being static pages hosted on cloudflare pages, is extremely low latency for the end user, even on bad connections

2. Danny Blue 10 min later

   @zachleat I have used it pretty extensively. I do not like it.

3. Sophie 15 min later

   @zachleat I use it, didn’t choose it

   1. Zach Leatherman 49 min later

      @sophie “use it didn’t choose it” is tragically catchy

      1. Sara Joy 56 min later

         @zachleat @sophie chalk me up as another one. I didn't choose the stack I make my living working on.

         1. Sara Joy 57 min later

            @zachleat @sophie also "use it, didn't choose it" really needs to be one of the "State of ..." devographics survey options

            1. Matt Stein 1 hr later

               @sarajw @zachleat @sophie Differentiating between enthusiasm and regret would be useful, too.

            2. James Basoo 1 hr later

               @sarajw @zachleat @sophie yep, that's exactly it. So many things I use because the platform/stack requires it, not by choice, GQL included.

            3. Sacha Greif 4 days later

               @sarajw @zachleat @tylersticka maybe one day!

      2. Private reply 3 hr later
4. Liam Bigelow 1 hr later

   @zachleat I think GraphQL can do some really cool things, and I enjoy using it in certain circumstances. I don’t think it’s a good fit for website frontends wrapping a database… which is unfortunately the main thing it’s used for.

   1. Zach Leatherman 1 hr later

      @bglw yeah—when you say website frontend, I assume you mean in client JS specifically? Or more broadly?

      1. Liam Bigelow 1 hr later

         @zachleat more broadly I guess. A lot of the parts I dislike around GQL are the pagination patterns, data loaders, and massive query mitigators. Which are all required when you’re essentially giving an end user access to a database. There are some contexts where you can skip all of those though, like build processes or server<>server communication, and in those contexts GQL’s core functionality can be really nice to use.

         1. Lars Ivar 1 hr later

            @bglw I suppose I am in this camp you describe, but I don't entirely understand the criticism. Are there alternatives that (assuming your app actually reflects the DB in some way) that would avoid these things you mention?

            @zachleat

            1. Liam Bigelow 17 hr later

               @larsivi @zachleat good old REST 😎 — more seriously, I don’t know! I don’t feel quite the same pain points building and consuming regular APIs. But maybe there’s something better out there, I’m not very well travelled

               1. Lars Ivar 17 hr later

                  @bglw @zachleat I'm not very well travelled in these respects either, having worked a lot with legacy legacy stuff, but I do feel that in the case where I use GQL, REST would complicate things really much (but at this point there is a well working GQL infrastructure in place).

5. Private reply 1 hr later
6. Francis 🏴‍☠️ Gulotta 2 hr later

   @zachleat I both love it and would ditch it in a heart beat. It’s a wonderful framework for an api server and for having many people work together. TRPC is popular for good reasons however.

7. Dan Ryan 2 hr later

   @zachleat kind of. Sanity uses their version of it and I have that on a few projects. But I won’t choose the route for anything new.

8. knaaaaaack 4 hr later

   @zachleat recently removed from several major sites due to “holy fuck why did we use this” syndrome. Also breaking changes are too broken.

9. Private reply 7 hr later
10. Gregory Daynes 8 hr later

    @zachleat use it, but don’t want to :(