Insights from the 2022 Fastify Survey

Survey finds web framework for Node.js is fast and performant

After the challenges that so many have faced the last few years, we really appreciate that so many Fastify users found the time to complete this survey. Fastify is a web framework for Node.js to help increase web performance, and is hosted by the OpenJS Foundation. Our community is everything, and getting feedback like this helps us to maintain and improve Fastify.

We had 108 respondents participate in this year’s survey, and surprising to no one,  the majority work in software or development, or are studying in those areas.

Most respondents found Fastify through GitHub, where Fastify’s repos reside. It is encouraging to see that Fastify is also being discovered through other mediums, which indicates a growing awareness of Fastify that will hopefully lead to more adoption and activity around the framework!

Where Fastify Excels

As the name of the framework implies, Fastify is fast and performant. Respondents overwhelmingly cited this as the reason why they enjoy using Fastify in their projects. Other positives included:

• Active development and community
• Documentation
• Ease-of-use and simplicity
• Growing plugin ecosystem
• Support for modern JavaScript features
• TypeScript support
• Matteo Collina’s involvement as lead maintainer

These helpful features and benefits have been the result of years of work by maintainers and contributors alike, so we’d like to extend a big thank you to everyone who has been involved with Fastify! Also, thanks to Matteo Collina (Twitter: @matteocollina) for being so charming that he brings all the users to the yard.

Respondents also indicated a high level of satisfaction with Fastify across the board:

Where Fastify Can Improve

We know that “perfection isn’t attainable but if we pursue it we can attain excellence.”  So we asked what improvements users would like to see in future releases.

Requests for additional TypeScript support far outweighed any other, with requests for more examples and clarity in documentation ranking second in priority. 75% of respondents stated they use TypeScript, so this is not surprising!

V4 of Fastify resolves some of these grievances, with new automatic types for query strings and bodies, fixes for missing types, typed decorators, and more. One of the responses requested support for hot reloading, which is currently being explored through tooling like restartable!

The overall sentiment of this feedback has been positive. As Fastify progresses into V4 and beyond we hope that we can remove pain points in Fastify that users have highlighted in their responses, whilst continuing to provide the high-performance users have come to expect!

Many thanks to Alix Robinson and Matteo Collina for preparing the survey. This article was brought to you by Frazer Smith.