The Starlette dev is the founder of Django Rest Framework.. Which is my least favorite part of working with Django. I really wish Django shipped with its own REST Framework.
I’ve been keeping an eye on FastAPI, Starlette, and a few other libraries but, compared to Django, they’re mostly powered by hype. I found a bunch of Pydantic bugs 2(3?)+ years ago that are only now getting addressed in v2.
There are a lot of other things to consider. Django only supports GET and POST out of the box and Django forms aren’t serializers. Those are just the obvious ones. Just returning JSON isn’t practical.
FastAPI is built on Starlette and adds more batteries included.
If you’re interested in async you’re far better off to go async native than with a framework that’s synchronous.
Asyncpg is the fastest Python Postgres driver there is, works well with sanic, Starlette or FastAPI.