Comment by stevefan1999

The ability to pick fields is nice, but the article failed to mention GraphQL's schema stitching and federation capability, which is its actual killer feature that is yet to be seen from any other "RPC" protocols, nix the gRPC which is insanely good for backend but maybe too demanding for web, even with grpc-web *1.

It allows you to separate your GraphQL in multiple "sub-graphs", and forward them to different microservices and facilitates separation of concern at backend level, while putting them back as one unified place for the frontend, giving it the best of both world in theory.

Yet unfortunately, both stitching and federation is rarely in practice due to the people's lack of fundamental abilities to comprehend and manage complexity, and that the web development is so fast, that one product is put out for one another year by year, and the old code is basically thrown away and remain unmaintained, they eventually "siloified"/solidified *2, and therefore it is natural for a simple solution like REST and OpenAPI/Swagger beats the complicated GraphQL, becaues the tech market right now just want to make the product quick and dirty, get the money, then let it go, rinse and repeat. Last 30 years of VC is basically that.

So let me tell you, this is the real reason GraphQL lost: GraphQL is the good money that was driven out, because the market just need the money, regardless of whether it is good, bad or ugly.

Speaking asides, I enjoy GraphQL so much in C#: https://chillicream.com/docs/hotchocolate/v15/defining-a-sch..., they even have integrations with EF Core which is mind-boggling: https://chillicream.com/docs/hotchocolate/v15/integrations/e...

It is so natural, and I've tried to make it run in the new single file C#, plus the dependency injection and NativeAOT...I think I made the single-file code in their discussion tab, but I couldn't find it.

Another good honorable mention would be this: https://opensource.expediagroup.com/graphql-kotlin/docs/sche..., I used it before in place with Koin and Exposed, but I eventually went back to Spring Boot and Hibernate because I needed the integrations despited I loved to have innovations.

*1: For example, why force everyone to use HTTP/2 and thus enfoced TLS by convention? This makes gRPC development quite hard that you will need to have self-signed key and certificates just for starting the server, and that is already a lot of barrier for most developers. And the protobuf, being a compact and concise binary protocol, is basically unreadable without the schema/reflection/introspection, and GraphQL still returns a JSON by default and you can choose to return MessagePack/CBOR based on what the HTTP request header asked for. Yes, grpc-web does return JSON and can be configured to run on H2C, but it is more like an afterthought and not designed for frontend developers

*2: Maybe the better word would be enshittified, but enshittification is a dynamic process to the bottom, while what I mean is more like rotten to death like a zombie, so is it too overboard?