What percentage of production Node.js systems use Adonis? It's probably vanishingly low. Laravel is nice, and it's been gaining a lot of adoption in new applications, but the GP said "90s PHP" for a reason. Modern Node JS backends are often littered with hand rolled SQL queries, poor MVC separation, and lots of shoddy, half baked model layers—often without using any library whatsoever. Which is a real shame, because I personally really love programming in JavaScript, and the performance is great, but the strength of Rails as a framework draws me back in every time.

How is hand rolled SQL queries something bad?

Bad. Like really bad. Unless you're doing it for some small corner case where you need up to the list bit of performance, raw SQL queries and mapping them to objects or manually moving or many pulsating the result sets manually is really bad. Specially for others having to maintain your code 3 years later.

There's a reason ORMs are so popular.

Personally I prefer the opposite, I have managed many old projects (10+ years old) and I always prefer raw SQL over some outdated ORM that is hard to configure and finetune. With SQL I have access to one of the most powerful query languages in existence that can never be matched by an database layer written in general purpose language.

Raw SQL can be a bit problematic if it is spread out in the entire code base with little structure ("littered"), however that is relatively easy to fix by centralizing the queries with a repository pattern. It is much harder to fix an ORM ten years later.

Do we know why ORM's are popular? I don't think it has to do with that ORM's are good, rather that developers want to avoid SQL because lack of experience, but that is me guessing based on my prejudice (I was myself in that category as a junior).

I have written in the past why ORM's are bad https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27407690

And I'm sure there's many similar situations like that in Ruby, Python, and other languages, you just don't hear about them because they don't power 99% of the internet like PHP and JavaScript does. ;)

I have to admit I'm getting a bit of fatigue reviewing frameworks in Node that are claimed to be batteries-included and similar to Rails/Django/Laravel. SailsJS, Redwood, NestJS, Remix, Prisma (ORM compared to Active Record). They all have an exciting landing page, clean looking documentation... but once you dig in further the feature set starts looking very <= Rails v1.0.

Anyways I appreciate the name drop of Adonis. I'll have to give it a fair shake when I'm not feeling quite as cynical because I _really_ do want to find a solid Node framework in this area.

Most "full stack" frameworks in the node ecosystem consider themselves "full stack" just because you can run code on the server. See the Fresh (deno) discussion here in HN from a few weeks ago.

To me a framework which doesn't come with a clear way to do translations, background jobs, query builder, ORM, migrations, asset bundling, validations, error handling, etc it is not full stack. It is just "server code compatible" at best.

Adonis is far, far, far from reaching even a small percent of what Laravel is. It has almost no community and very little or almost no third party packages. When I tried it las year I couldn't even find a formatter for the templates.

Later I've found out the author of the framework has fake accounts pretending to be a happy user of it, and that was the end of it for me.

So, not comparable at all in my opinion.