AKA: “The big webonyx/graphql-php migration.”

After having an eye on it for quite some time now, it’s been decided that the GraphQL module for Drupal should switch to the more mature webonyx/graphql-php library for parsing and executing. This brings some exciting new improvements and possibilities:

Improved performance

Lazy construction of schema plugins and an improved query execution leads to an overall performance boost.

With the improved possibilities to scan an analyse a queries AST even before execution, cache invalidation has become a lot smarter and very specific. This is also the first step to caching partial query trees.

Execution context

A context object is handed down the GraphQL evaluation tree, that allows us to safely pass state to branches. This finally allows intuitive and easy language handling across query fragments.

Improved developer experience

If the development setting is enabled, the query processor will emit very detailed error reports and exception traces. This should make writing own plugins and identifying problems a lot easier.

Breaking changes

All this goodness also has a cost. There have been some small but unavoidable breaking changes. Please refer to the upgrade guide and check if this affects you.