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I built a fairly involved mobile application that used Firestore and cloud functions. The criticisms of the two made in the article are very fair. I also think there are even more significant ramifications of the issues touched on which result in horrible problems for developers.

I have a lengthy list of complaints about both firestore and the firabase flavor of cloud functions, however, I will say that the ease of getting started with the firebase suite is unmatched, in my experience. Compared to any product on AWS or raw GCP, it feels like an actual product with people thinking about their users.

There is also a large community around the firebase products, the main example being Invertase.io which provides amazing open source native clients for firebase.

Regarding Convex specifically, the approach of writing queries server side seems great. The docs aren't clear (to me) about whether the queries only send incremental state changes. I would assume and hope that is the case.

In this bit[1] it seems like the function needs to execute the entire query again, which could become a significant performance issue.

[1] https://docs.convex.dev/understanding/convex-fundamentals/fu...




The results of Convex functions are cached, which means they only need to be recomputed when the data they rely on changes.

This is by no means a panacea, but it does result in different performance characteristics than one might expect.


They may be cached, but if the underlying data changes, which seems likely in the messages example, it looks like the entire query has to run again.




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