Comment by arnath
6 hours ago
Why would you rewrite something that’s widely considered one of the best written and tested pieces of software in the world?
6 hours ago
Why would you rewrite something that’s widely considered one of the best written and tested pieces of software in the world?
Among many other things, they built a system that can provide substantially better concurrency and a better async story.
Also, they're building a project that's more open to outsiders.
They were aiming for better concurrency, I believe. If you're rewriting something regardless, might as well use a more modern language that's easier to reason about during development.
That's how you push the field forward. Good isn't good enough.
If yiu had the resources/time, why wouldn't you challenge or improve status quo?
Sqlite is excellent but I still have many gripes with it, especially around defaults.
I think Richard Hipp has quipped “if you think you can build a better SQLite by god you’re welcome to try!”
I do not recall ever saying that.
Best tested..? The test data/suite is private. That alone is quite odd.
It's not odd at all if you understand the purpose of SQLite's governance model. Much better than letting VC + SV rat fuck everything for solitary monetary gain.
> It's not odd at all if you understand the purpose of SQLite's governance model.
The purpose of SQLite's governance model is to be a cult, that only accepts members who share the same religion.
The software happens to be good. Getting it away from that governance and turning it into an open community sounds great. And that can happen while still maintaining high standards.
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The Rust rewrite? I had the same question.
It’s fast, with unparalleled stability, arguably better managed than any other software on earth, deployed on literally everything, so let’s… fork it for street cred?
Rewriting in Rust is usually an exercise in reducing serious security vulnerabilities and memory bugs, not improving speed or stability.
But with LLMs and massive, human-written test suites, rewrites aren’t a bad idea like they used to be. Rust is a perfect target language because it’s compiler is so strict and surfaces issues in a way that’s easy for either humans or LLMs to use.
Something tells me the test suites won't be human written, for most of them. They probably won't be fully human reviewed even.
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Another way of describing Turso is a SQLite-compatible (same file format and C API) embedded database. If you start with SQLite but find you need async i/o, concurrent writers, and local replicas then Turso is a good option.
Because they wanted something like this story to happen. It's what VC does to open source, they aren't here to help or build communities they are here to make money. Nothing else matters.
it's funny, because money is the number 1,000 or even lower thing on my priorities.
Turso has a booming OSS community with many contributors from outside the company and is fully MIT.