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Comment by bouncing | Hacker News Reader

I had actually looked at Flask-RESTPlus for a relatively recent project before deciding to use FastAPI.

You made the right choice.

Surprised they use Flask.

I'm working on my first larger, industrial-strength REST API in Python and I've found the Django Rest Framework to be more suited once you get to that level of complexity.

Probably whoever made it just preferred Flask.

django-rest-framework is nice because it's maintained well and it's consistent with the rest of Django, but plenty of people just prefer the Flask way of doing things, even if it's a scrappier set of tools in some ways.

I'm using DRF in a project and don't really like the code/magic I end up with. IIRC I was happier with Flask and SQL... (But of course, for the bits that maps properly into its model, DRF its awesome)

Yeah. You can always get into what you do/don't like about a framework, but the same can be said of Flask.

FWIW, I don't like DRF's reliance on serializers that do more than serialization.

Django works great if you're buying into the Django ecosystem. But if you're standing up a simple REST API, I've found Flask is much more flexible. Either approach will get you to where you're going, but I find Flask gets out of your way and lets you do your thing, while you have to find the Django Way of doing what you need to do.

This may be biased (I've been a Flask user since 0.7), and perhaps I'm stuck in my ways, but I've found I either need to find a supported and blessed Django plugin for the thing I need, or build something much more complex than I'd need in Flask.

For typical apps I think that Django is far superior to Flask because every Flask project ends up recreating a lot of Django's core functionality; but in a more time consuming and less standardized way.

For a company as specialized as Netflix, they probably are doing so much customization it doesn't matter much which framework they started with.

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