Thanks for starting the discussion. I think Reason could indeed do very well on the backend, even though it’s a bit lacking right now. Express most definitely has bunch of flaws but it’s something that a lot of people know and use to build smaller scale projects. I think there’s tremendous value in having an express-like API just to attract NodeJS developers.
There are 2 things people want to do when they first try Reason:
- make a react app
- make a mostly static backend (hey, one promise of Reason is to be usable anywhere right)
Right now they can do #1 but when they ask about #2 I don’t want to point to something super different from express. Actually I’d literally tell them “you can use express! Look at bs-express” and that reassures them and makes them wanna build a full-stack reason website.
So tl;dr I think there’s a lot of value in blindly binding / copying NodeJS APIs for the sake of familiarity for newcomers.
EDIT: That said, the same way ReasonReact is working on fixing the problems of React, you could make the Express API evolve to be better / faster / more secure and that’d be a HUGE selling point.