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We went all in on FastAPI with my team, but we're hit the issue that the projects of Tiangolo (FastAPI, SQLModel, Typer) seem to be turning pretty much unmainta

We went all in on FastAPI with my team, but we're hit the issue that the projects of Tiangolo (FastAPI, SQLModel, Typer) seem to be turning pretty much unmaintained : https://github.com/tiangolo/fastapi/discussions/3970 https://github.com/tiangolo/fastapi/discussions/3970 We've already been hit by multiple bugs with fixing PR opened, but left to rot, and missing documentation : the 'tutorial' documentation is great, but if you want a reference you have to go read the code. I guess that's the issue when you pick projects maintained by one person, so for my next projects I might get back to something built on stronger grounds, like Django. How is Django this day with modern Python constructs like typing in general and Pydantic models integration ?

rglullis 5y ago
Not to single you out, but are you or your business supporting the project (financially) in any way?
- Radim 5y ago
  I sometimes get these almost angry emails about Gensim, my open source library. How come I'm not responding faster, merging PRs, fixing issues? For this critical popular project??! Meanwhile, sponsorships are at 13% of the (not terribly ambitious) goal of $6k/month [0]. Yeah, that's why. [0] https://github.com/sponsors/piskvorky https://github.com/sponsors/piskvorky
  - Sinidir 5y ago
    Thanks for creating Gensim!
  - dr_zoidberg 5y ago
    > How come I'm not responding faster, merging PRs, fixing issues? For this critical popular project??! > Meanwhile, sponsorships are at 13% of the (not terribly ambitious) goal of $6k/month The answer would then be: "because I have to keep another job to pay the bills" then? Hope you can get to your goal ASAP. Going by stupidly quick math, you have 12k stars for gesim alone, and that boils down that if every star on github payed 50 cents you'd already be there. I know that starring doesn't mean anything other than "hey, this looks interesting!", but then again 50 cents is probably cheap enough for a majority of those "stars" that they wouldn't even notice. Also: thanks for creating and maintaining gensim!
  - legutierr 5y ago
    Do you ever respond to these emails telling them that they can hire you to attend to their issue? If my business depended heavily on an open-source component that needed a bug fix, more often than not I would pay the person to spend their time to resolve it. Often it is easier to get a business to pay a consulting fee for a specific thing rather than make a donation that goes into a general funding pool for a project.
    - ldng 5y ago
      But that triggers different accounting/taxes paths that can be problematic. Not everybody is a freelancer.
    - Radim 5y ago
      Yes, I do. But it turns out that their issue is pretty much always only tangentially related to Gensim (or any other open source library / technology). They're solving a business problem. That's what brings them money, with which they pay me, and I acknowledge that. This leaves me with two choices: 1. Help narrowly, with the Gensim part only. Pros: easy for me. Cons: doesn't truly help the customer; feels dirty. 2. Help solve their actual business problem. Even if it means not using ML at all (a very common outcome), or suggesting a different architecture. In my experience, most companies are so lost as to what to expect from ML, or how to get there, that I didn't feel comfortable with the "narrow" help. Lipstick on a pig. So I went the full consulting route for a few years. But that felt too draining so I dropped it and created a product instead.
  - leo_blask 5y ago
    Gensim is fantastic. Just used it in tandem with FastText to get a machine learning app running for one of my clients. Thank you for it!
- Majestic121 5y ago
  I do with PR, and by strongly recommending the sponsored classes (from testdriven.io in the ads on the doc : https://fastapi.tiangolo.com/ https://fastapi.tiangolo.com/) for my company, but you're right that I could push harder for official corporate sponsorship.
abdusco 5y ago
I share your thoughts on Typer[0]. It's a super cool project, but lacking proper hooking points to interact with the `click`[1] lib underneath [2], I am not sure if it would be the best decision to use Typer when we're rewriting our CLI. [0]: https://github.com/tiangolo/typer/ https://github.com/tiangolo/typer/ [1]: https://click.palletsprojects.com/ https://click.palletsprojects.com/ [2]: https://github.com/tiangolo/typer/issues/77 https://github.com/tiangolo/typer/issues/77
windexh8er 5y ago
Genuinely curious how you happened to choose FastAPI over something more in the middle, like Flask? I tried a few tools in FastAPI, and it's fantastic for those, but I think I'd still stick with Flask for something more well rounded (not just as an API server).
- clepto 5y ago
  At least for my team we went with FastAPI because we have other tools for everything else, and FastAPI is incredibly simple for new members to pick up. We tend to say that we made a “FastAPI application” but in reality FastAPI is only powering the REST interface for interacting with the platform. We use SQLAlchemy for database interaction, a lot of direct usage of Pydantic, Celery with RabbitMQ/Redis for task processing. FastAPI provides a really lightweight interface to gluing pieces like this together.
  - Nextgrid 5y ago
    > We use SQLAlchemy for database interaction, a lot of direct usage of Pydantic, Celery with RabbitMQ/Redis for task processing. FastAPI provides a really lightweight interface to gluing pieces like this together. Just wondering, why have you not gone with Django directly if you’ve essentially ended up reimplementing your own version of it?
    - fernandotakai 5y ago
      that's how i feel about all these python "micro frameworks". you start simple, but then you realize you need some kind of db access, some kind of caching, some kind of authentication, maybe some admin interfaces.... aaand you re-implemented django yet again.
      - Nextgrid 5y ago
        Exactly the reason why I don’t care about either FastAPI or Flask. In my experience you’ll always need more than what it comes with out of the box and you’ll end up building your own (crappy) Django.
Nextgrid 5y ago
> typing I believe there's a third-party package "django-stubs" that provides type hints for Django code. For your own code, it's just Python in the end so you can type-hint it as you normally would. > Pydantic models integration There isn't as far as I know. Django has its own model layer however unlike Pydantic, Django's is purely for the DB level, it's not there to (de?)serialize JSON. In the Django world you'd typically use Django Rest Framework serializers for that. Now you can use Pydantic and it probably won't be too much work to make them work with DRF, but whether it's worth it is a different matter - DRF gives you a lot of stuff for free such as auto-generating serializers based on DB models (including validation and everything) which you wouldn't get with Pydantic.
- nurbel 5y ago
  There is https://django-ninja.rest-framework.com/ https://django-ninja.rest-framework.com/ which would be an alternative for DRF ,heavily inspired by FastApi, that integrates with Pydantic.
- WD-42 5y ago
  Pydantic allows you to write super clean (in comparison to DRF) serializers using just type hints, as opposed to the declarative approach of DRF serializers. It's really nice and refreshing.
squaresmile 5y ago
I'm thinking about using Starlette directly. It doesn't look that much more verbose than FastAPI and I already disagreed and bypassed a few FastAPI features. I wonder how much work would it take to hook the Pydantic models with their SchemaGenerator.
holler 5y ago
Have you considered moving to Starlette a la carte? I use marshmallow for schemas and a few other minimal deps and it's been a breeze.
tiangolo 5y ago
Hey! FastAPI author here. I do have a bunch of issues and PRs to review across the projects. But as I personally review and in most cases fine-tune and update each one of the PRs (if you check the history, almost no PR is directly merged, most of them require updates) it's taking me a bit to handle them all, but I'm on it. I even changed my working structure to optimize for more open source. Sadly, new issues and new discussions like that one linked asking why the other issues are not solved, don't really help, as they just add another issue for me to read and take care of. I'm also prioritizing the work that can have the most impact. For example recently I was helping a bit with AnyIO and Trio, as they are used underneath by FastAPI. And now I'm working on something for Pydantic, that would be used by SQLModel and FastAPI. If you want to see faster progress, there are several ways to help, they are all documented here: https://fastapi.tiangolo.com/help-fastapi/ https://fastapi.tiangolo.com/help-fastapi/ One of the things that consumes time the most is handling issues by others. If you go and help them and they close those issues, that's a lot of minutes (in some cases hours) that you save me, and that I can then dedicate to review the other issues and PRs.
- lowercase00 5y ago
  Totally understand your point, makes sense, and indeed if the community were to be more supportive with issues/PR it would be very helpful for the project. Seeing this kind of topic fairly frequently, it would be great to understand the short/mid/long term plan for the project in terms of governance. I guess we can all agree that having a single maintainer on a +40k stars project with huge adoption (amazing stuff btw) is unsustainable and extremely difficult, and can drive people away from adopting it in big corporations (I've seen a few comments on Github that mention this), and can make early adopters eerie. I honestly have no idea on how to do that, but some other projects have been able to (fairly) successfully descentralize the development to be able to keep pace with the development. It's obviously fair and understandable if the long term will still depend entirely on you, being the creator, you obviously have 100% right to do things the way you want, and nobody can argue against that. I guess it could be helpful to give the community some guidance on what's the idea for the future of project, and whether it will have a more distributed governance or if it will continue being centralized. Any of those paths is fine of course, I guess it would just help people deciding the framework choice for the future.
ccanassa 5y ago
Experience told me to be very conservative when picking frameworks. For small projects and personal, sure, just pick whatever you want and have fun! But for serious projects, you should stick with old and stable software. I made the mistake of picking Flask for a really big project when these microframeworks were a fad and everyone was dismissing the big ones like Django and RoR. That was a very costly mistake. I learned the hard way provides way so many things out-of-box that I always took for granted but I had to manually implement in Flask. Take tests for example, Django automatically makes sure that any DB operation is cleaned by the end of the test. That's sometimes that I never gave a thought until our Flask tests started leaking everywhere. The way that Django handles that problem is very clever and we had to manually do it Flask.

rglullis 5y ago

Not to single you out, but are you or your business supporting the project (financially) in any way?

Radim 5y ago
I sometimes get these almost angry emails about Gensim, my open source library. How come I'm not responding faster, merging PRs, fixing issues? For this critical popular project??! Meanwhile, sponsorships are at 13% of the (not terribly ambitious) goal of $6k/month [0]. Yeah, that's why. [0] https://github.com/sponsors/piskvorky https://github.com/sponsors/piskvorky
- Sinidir 5y ago
  Thanks for creating Gensim!
- dr_zoidberg 5y ago
  > How come I'm not responding faster, merging PRs, fixing issues? For this critical popular project??! > Meanwhile, sponsorships are at 13% of the (not terribly ambitious) goal of $6k/month The answer would then be: "because I have to keep another job to pay the bills" then? Hope you can get to your goal ASAP. Going by stupidly quick math, you have 12k stars for gesim alone, and that boils down that if every star on github payed 50 cents you'd already be there. I know that starring doesn't mean anything other than "hey, this looks interesting!", but then again 50 cents is probably cheap enough for a majority of those "stars" that they wouldn't even notice. Also: thanks for creating and maintaining gensim!
- legutierr 5y ago
  Do you ever respond to these emails telling them that they can hire you to attend to their issue? If my business depended heavily on an open-source component that needed a bug fix, more often than not I would pay the person to spend their time to resolve it. Often it is easier to get a business to pay a consulting fee for a specific thing rather than make a donation that goes into a general funding pool for a project.
  - ldng 5y ago
    But that triggers different accounting/taxes paths that can be problematic. Not everybody is a freelancer.
  - Radim 5y ago
    Yes, I do. But it turns out that their issue is pretty much always only tangentially related to Gensim (or any other open source library / technology). They're solving a business problem. That's what brings them money, with which they pay me, and I acknowledge that. This leaves me with two choices: 1. Help narrowly, with the Gensim part only. Pros: easy for me. Cons: doesn't truly help the customer; feels dirty. 2. Help solve their actual business problem. Even if it means not using ML at all (a very common outcome), or suggesting a different architecture. In my experience, most companies are so lost as to what to expect from ML, or how to get there, that I didn't feel comfortable with the "narrow" help. Lipstick on a pig. So I went the full consulting route for a few years. But that felt too draining so I dropped it and created a product instead.
- leo_blask 5y ago
  Gensim is fantastic. Just used it in tandem with FastText to get a machine learning app running for one of my clients. Thank you for it!
Majestic121 5y ago
I do with PR, and by strongly recommending the sponsored classes (from testdriven.io in the ads on the doc : https://fastapi.tiangolo.com/ https://fastapi.tiangolo.com/) for my company, but you're right that I could push harder for official corporate sponsorship.

abdusco 5y ago

I share your thoughts on Typer[0]. It's a super cool project, but lacking proper hooking points to interact with the `click`[1] lib underneath [2], I am not sure if it would be the best decision to use Typer when we're rewriting our CLI. [0]: https://github.com/tiangolo/typer/ https://github.com/tiangolo/typer/ [1]: https://click.palletsprojects.com/ https://click.palletsprojects.com/ [2]: https://github.com/tiangolo/typer/issues/77 https://github.com/tiangolo/typer/issues/77

windexh8er 5y ago

Genuinely curious how you happened to choose FastAPI over something more in the middle, like Flask? I tried a few tools in FastAPI, and it's fantastic for those, but I think I'd still stick with Flask for something more well rounded (not just as an API server).

clepto 5y ago
At least for my team we went with FastAPI because we have other tools for everything else, and FastAPI is incredibly simple for new members to pick up. We tend to say that we made a “FastAPI application” but in reality FastAPI is only powering the REST interface for interacting with the platform. We use SQLAlchemy for database interaction, a lot of direct usage of Pydantic, Celery with RabbitMQ/Redis for task processing. FastAPI provides a really lightweight interface to gluing pieces like this together.
- Nextgrid 5y ago
  > We use SQLAlchemy for database interaction, a lot of direct usage of Pydantic, Celery with RabbitMQ/Redis for task processing. FastAPI provides a really lightweight interface to gluing pieces like this together. Just wondering, why have you not gone with Django directly if you’ve essentially ended up reimplementing your own version of it?
  - fernandotakai 5y ago
    that's how i feel about all these python "micro frameworks". you start simple, but then you realize you need some kind of db access, some kind of caching, some kind of authentication, maybe some admin interfaces.... aaand you re-implemented django yet again.
    - Nextgrid 5y ago
      Exactly the reason why I don’t care about either FastAPI or Flask. In my experience you’ll always need more than what it comes with out of the box and you’ll end up building your own (crappy) Django.

Nextgrid 5y ago

> typing I believe there's a third-party package "django-stubs" that provides type hints for Django code. For your own code, it's just Python in the end so you can type-hint it as you normally would. > Pydantic models integration There isn't as far as I know. Django has its own model layer however unlike Pydantic, Django's is purely for the DB level, it's not there to (de?)serialize JSON. In the Django world you'd typically use Django Rest Framework serializers for that. Now you can use Pydantic and it probably won't be too much work to make them work with DRF, but whether it's worth it is a different matter - DRF gives you a lot of stuff for free such as auto-generating serializers based on DB models (including validation and everything) which you wouldn't get with Pydantic.

nurbel 5y ago
There is https://django-ninja.rest-framework.com/ https://django-ninja.rest-framework.com/ which would be an alternative for DRF ,heavily inspired by FastApi, that integrates with Pydantic.
WD-42 5y ago
Pydantic allows you to write super clean (in comparison to DRF) serializers using just type hints, as opposed to the declarative approach of DRF serializers. It's really nice and refreshing.

squaresmile 5y ago

I'm thinking about using Starlette directly. It doesn't look that much more verbose than FastAPI and I already disagreed and bypassed a few FastAPI features. I wonder how much work would it take to hook the Pydantic models with their SchemaGenerator.

holler 5y ago

Have you considered moving to Starlette a la carte? I use marshmallow for schemas and a few other minimal deps and it's been a breeze.

tiangolo 5y ago

Hey! FastAPI author here. I do have a bunch of issues and PRs to review across the projects. But as I personally review and in most cases fine-tune and update each one of the PRs (if you check the history, almost no PR is directly merged, most of them require updates) it's taking me a bit to handle them all, but I'm on it. I even changed my working structure to optimize for more open source. Sadly, new issues and new discussions like that one linked asking why the other issues are not solved, don't really help, as they just add another issue for me to read and take care of. I'm also prioritizing the work that can have the most impact. For example recently I was helping a bit with AnyIO and Trio, as they are used underneath by FastAPI. And now I'm working on something for Pydantic, that would be used by SQLModel and FastAPI. If you want to see faster progress, there are several ways to help, they are all documented here: https://fastapi.tiangolo.com/help-fastapi/ https://fastapi.tiangolo.com/help-fastapi/ One of the things that consumes time the most is handling issues by others. If you go and help them and they close those issues, that's a lot of minutes (in some cases hours) that you save me, and that I can then dedicate to review the other issues and PRs.

lowercase00 5y ago
Totally understand your point, makes sense, and indeed if the community were to be more supportive with issues/PR it would be very helpful for the project. Seeing this kind of topic fairly frequently, it would be great to understand the short/mid/long term plan for the project in terms of governance. I guess we can all agree that having a single maintainer on a +40k stars project with huge adoption (amazing stuff btw) is unsustainable and extremely difficult, and can drive people away from adopting it in big corporations (I've seen a few comments on Github that mention this), and can make early adopters eerie. I honestly have no idea on how to do that, but some other projects have been able to (fairly) successfully descentralize the development to be able to keep pace with the development. It's obviously fair and understandable if the long term will still depend entirely on you, being the creator, you obviously have 100% right to do things the way you want, and nobody can argue against that. I guess it could be helpful to give the community some guidance on what's the idea for the future of project, and whether it will have a more distributed governance or if it will continue being centralized. Any of those paths is fine of course, I guess it would just help people deciding the framework choice for the future.

ccanassa 5y ago

Experience told me to be very conservative when picking frameworks. For small projects and personal, sure, just pick whatever you want and have fun! But for serious projects, you should stick with old and stable software. I made the mistake of picking Flask for a really big project when these microframeworks were a fad and everyone was dismissing the big ones like Django and RoR. That was a very costly mistake. I learned the hard way provides way so many things out-of-box that I always took for granted but I had to manually implement in Flask. Take tests for example, Django automatically makes sure that any DB operation is cleaned by the end of the test. That's sometimes that I never gave a thought until our Flask tests started leaking everywhere. The way that Django handles that problem is very clever and we had to manually do it Flask.