Design

We designed Falcon to support the demanding needs of large-scale microservices and responsive app backends. Falcon complements more general Python web frameworks by providing extra performance, reliability, and flexibility wherever you need it.

Fast. Same hardware, more requests. Falcon turns around requests several times faster than most other Python frameworks. For an extra speed boost, Falcon compiles itself with Cython when available, and also works well with PyPy. Considering a move to another programming language? Benchmark with Falcon + PyPy first.

Reliable. We go to great lengths to avoid introducing breaking changes, and when we do they are fully documented and only introduced (in the spirit of SemVer) with a major version increment. The code is rigorously tested with numerous inputs and we require 100% coverage at all times. Six and mimeparse are the only third-party dependencies.

Flexible. Falcon leaves a lot of decisions and implementation details to you, the API developer. This gives you a lot of freedom to customize and tune your implementation. Due to Falcon's minimalist design, Python community members are free to independently innovate on Falcon add-ons and complementary packages.

Debuggable. Falcon eschews magic. It's easy to tell which inputs lead to which outputs. Unhandled exceptions are never encapsulated or masked. Potentially surprising behaviors, such as automatic request body parsing, are well-documented and disabled by default. Finally, when it comes to the framework itself, we take care to keep logic paths simple and understandable. All this makes it easier to reason about the code and to debug edge cases in large-scale deployments.