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Comment by copperx | Hacker News Reader

I'm always surprised that PostgREST isn't the industry standard for creating an API. It looks like it would save so much work and the corner cases can be handled without writing code in a different language.

What am I missing?

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I tried it, and still have it running on a little toy service I built. It's cool, but IMO, it doesn't really seem production-ready for a large-scale service. Last time I updated it, I had to spend a full day sorting out the changes they made to how the server config and user authentication works. Last I checked, they don't even have a suggested script to run it as a service. Going by the contributor graph, it's still essentially a 1-person project.

IIRC, this was what the connection poolers (pgpool, pgbouncer), and perhaps all now-popular postgres extensions/enhancements, looked like in their initial years, as well.

In the context of a "large-scale service", my guess is that there's a chicken-and-egg problem, where an operators of such a service has to decide they want it to be production-ready enough to throw money and/or engineering resources at the project, which can attract yet more contributors.

> a chicken-and-egg problem

The way I see it. Large corporations have the golden egg laying hen. And plebian project like PostgREST have little to no chance.

If I had to guess, this is due to a combination of only being a few years old and marketing (initially, the major version number was 0).

PostgraphQL

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