How and why GraphQL will influence the Sourcehut alpha

I don't understand the attraction to Graphql. (I do understand it if maybe you actually want the things that gRPC or Thrift etc gives you)

It seems like exactly the ORM solution/problem but even more abstract and less under control since it pushes the orm out to browser clients and the frontend devs.

ORM suffer from being at beyond arms length from the query analyzer in the database server.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Query_optimization

A query optimizer that's been tuned over decades by pretty serious people.

Bad queries, overfetching, sudden performance cliffs everywhere.

Graphql actually adds another query language on top of the normal orm problem. (Maybe the answer is that graphql is so simple by design that it has no dark corners but that seems like a matter of mathematical proof that I haven't seen alluded to).

Why is graphql not going to have exactly this problem as we see people actually start to work seriously with it?

Four or five implementations in javascript, haskell and now go. From what I could see none of them were mentioning query optimization as an aspiration.

Seems like you're looking at this through the lens of a single system that could submit a query to a single database and get all the data it needs. From that perspective GraphQL is definitely an extra layer that probably doesn't make sense. But even then there's still some value in letting the client specify the shape of the the data it needs and having client SDKs (there's definitely non-GraphQL ways to achieve these too).

My impression is GraphQL starts to shine when you have multiple backend systems, probably separated based on your org chart, and the frontend team needs to stitch them together for cohesive UX. The benchmark isn't absolute performance here, it's whether it performs better than the poor mobile app making a dozen separate API calls to different backends to stitch together a view.

That's indeed one of its selling points. But most products I see that adopt graphql are exactly 1 database.

I think lots of people here are fixed on GraphQL from a backend perspective and are missing that GraphQL has a fantastic front end development experience using libraries like Apollo.

I honestly think the backend benefits are relatively marginal, but on the client being able to 1) mock your entire backend before it even exists, 2) have built in automatic caching on every query and entity for free, 3) use a fully declarative, easily testable and mockable React hook API built with out-of-the-box exposed support for loading and error states, is so valuable. Components written against Apollo feel so clean and simple. That's not to say anything about the benefits you get from being able to introspect the entire backend API or test queries against it with Apollo's extensions or how you can easily retain the entire entity cache across reloads with simple plugins to Apollo.

Can you do all that with REST? Sure. But writing queries against REST APIs is a pain in the butt compared to what you get for free by using Apollo.