Simon Willison’s Weblog

30th May 2024 - Link Blog

Why, after 6 years, I’m over GraphQL (via) I've seen many of these criticisms of GraphQL before - N+1 queries, the difficulty of protecting against deeply nested queries - but Matt Bessey collects them all in one place and adds an issue I hadn't considered before: the complexity of authorization, where each field in the query might involve extra permission checks:

In my experience, this is actually the biggest source of performance issues. We would regularly find that our queries were spending more time authorising data than anything else.

The 600+ comment Hacker News thread is crammed with GraphQL war stories, mostly supporting the conclusions of the article.