Roadmap: 4.x

Roadmap for 4.x

Themes

ASGI

• Refine the implementation
• Affordances to support common SSE, WebSocket patterns (e.g., detecting closed SSE connection)
• Ecosystem integrations. https://github.com/falconry/falcon/discussions/1932

Frequently requested "missing" features

• AuthN/Z: Affordances to support JWT, OAuth2 workflows and POLP/RBAC. Provide building blocks that can be composed to provide custom auth, Okta flows, Google OAuth2, etc. (with accompanying documented recipes (see also: https://fastapi.tiangolo.com/tutorial/security/oauth2-jwt/ and https://developer.okta.com/docs/concepts/oauth-openid/ and https://portswigger.net/research/hidden-oauth-attack-vectors and https://www.torocloud.com/podcast/oauth-web-api-security-matthias-biehl)
• Routing: Revise feature requests from the community. Add affordances to match multiple path segments? Routing to sub-applications? (See also this discussion.) https://github.com/falconry/falcon/issues/1950
• REST: resource representation creation and consumption; url_for and perhaps also opt-in pydantic support?
• Affordances to support API description format generators and frontends (e.g, OpenAPI, API Blueprint) -- check community project(s) already available for Falcon?
• Better typing (mypy) support -- add type hints or stubs to the code base, and documentation examples: https://github.com/falconry/falcon/issues/1350 & https://github.com/falconry/falcon/issues/1820. See also: PEP 484.
• CLI: scaffolding tool?

Docs

• Recipes: Things like how to deploy in production, how to spawn background tasks, how to make use of ASGI lifecycle events, how to do AuthN/Z, and how to handle the DAL (SQLAlchemy, asyncpg, but perhaps we can also document piccolo, et al.). What else?
• Recipes: Serverless deployments (see also: https://github.com/falconry/falcon/issues/1552)
• How to make recipes easier to find? Try to link from reference docs in more places?
• Update Dash docs for 3.x (won't fix)
• Recorded talk re: Intro to Falcon? Encourage people to check out doc recipes in "where to go from here" at the end of the talk.

Performance

• Test: Benchmarking improvements (CI gate, ASGI, etc.)
• Performance: https://github.com/falconry/falcon/issues/1664 -- also for ASGI explore if it is possible to exploit cythonization to get a slight performance bump. See also: https://github.com/falconry/falcon/pull/1860#issue-571338714 -- although cythonization offered a moderate improvement in isolated benchmarks, the actual ASGI servers seem to wrap the app in a way that degrades performance to worse than pure-Python.

4.0.0

• CPython 3.11, 3.12 & 3.13 support
• Drop 3.5, 3.6 & 3.7
• Path converter
• Type annotations
• Mimeparse reimplementation
• CHIPS support

4.1.0

• Static route improvements
• Revise cythonization process
• WebSocket sink tuning & fixes

4.2.0

• Generic App types
• Improved performance of percent-encoding of URIs
• Free-threaded wheels for CPython 3.14

4.3.0

• New OpenAPI-focused req.get_param_* methods
• Allow to override the default responders via on_request()

4.4.0

• Log all errors
• Ability to execute logic after the response is fully streamed

4.5.0

• Native OpenTelemetry integration (prototype)
• Revamp benchmarking system
• Update benchmarks on falconframework.org

4.6.0 and beyond

TBD: Include 1-2 doc improvements, and one "missing feature" such as url_for or basic JWT/OAuth2 affordances that can be expanded upon in future releases. Potentially also include Trio support if decided to do it and is ready.

• Docs: Additional recipes, make recipes easier to find
• Features: OpenAPI spec
• Features: url_for
• Features: full resp content type negotiation
• Performance: Basic WSGI perf gate - https://github.com/falconry/falcon/pull/1825
• Performance: Basic ASGI perf gate
• Features: Baseline JWT/OAuth2 affordances and recipes