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Used ORMs in many different languages, from ActiveRecord, Hibernate, EntityFramework, SQLAlchemy, Bookshelf.js, GORM, and Ecto (Ecto was the best, ActiveRecord

Used ORMs in many different languages, from ActiveRecord, Hibernate, EntityFramework, SQLAlchemy, Bookshelf.js, GORM, and Ecto (Ecto was the best, ActiveRecord was the most "feature rich", Hibernate makes me cry, and EntityFramework is OK so long as you give Microsoft a lot of money). For dynamic languages the downsides are increased runtime cost over simply writing and executing sql and doing the mapping yourself, and tons of magic. Magic everywhere. Magic makes things harder to debug. For static languagges the downsides are heavy impedence mismatch, obtuse to use APIs at times (to overcome type systems), and again, a performance hit. What I have found is for the majority of the time, people who say they want an ORM, what they really want is a type-safe (or type-hinted) way to write queries and operate on returned data. That's probably 90% of the value add. That can be done without a heavy, complex ORM framework.

moltar 5y ago
Totally agree! I come from the world of Perl, at the start of my career. Perl has DBIx::Class, still one of the best ORMs IMO. I’ve transitioned via PHP and Laravel, which also has a decent ORM. Nowadays I’m heavy into TypeScript and have tried every ORM there is in the JS/TypeScript land. And I’ve settled on Zapatos, which is not an ORM, but exactly what you describe. It’s a utility that helps writing type safe and hinted queries. This approach contrasted with, let’s say, TypeORM which is full of broken magic under the hood, is a breath of fresh air and is a delight to use. Together with that I write simple repository wrappers manually and surprisingly there aren’t that many of them.
spion 5y ago
I don't think EntityFramework Core (on NET Core) costs all that much?
- dimitrios1 5y ago
  To get the full power of EntityFramework, with all the cool code and graph generation, I think you need a paid version of Visual Studio and SSMS, although I could be wrong. Either way costing anything at all already puts it at a disadvantage compared to the others I mentioned.

moltar 5y ago

Totally agree! I come from the world of Perl, at the start of my career. Perl has DBIx::Class, still one of the best ORMs IMO. I’ve transitioned via PHP and Laravel, which also has a decent ORM. Nowadays I’m heavy into TypeScript and have tried every ORM there is in the JS/TypeScript land. And I’ve settled on Zapatos, which is not an ORM, but exactly what you describe. It’s a utility that helps writing type safe and hinted queries. This approach contrasted with, let’s say, TypeORM which is full of broken magic under the hood, is a breath of fresh air and is a delight to use. Together with that I write simple repository wrappers manually and surprisingly there aren’t that many of them.

spion 5y ago

I don't think EntityFramework Core (on NET Core) costs all that much?

dimitrios1 5y ago
To get the full power of EntityFramework, with all the cool code and graph generation, I think you need a paid version of Visual Studio and SSMS, although I could be wrong. Either way costing anything at all already puts it at a disadvantage compared to the others I mentioned.