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SQLite is a much younger project than I thought it was. Given the ubiquity, and capabilities that it provides, it's impressive. On the other hand, Linux and Pyt

by sargun 6y ago

SQLite is a much younger project than I thought it was. Given the ubiquity, and capabilities that it provides, it's impressive. On the other hand, Linux and Python are 29 years old. Postgres, in its current form is ~23 years old. It started in the 1980s.

lstamour 6y ago
I’m also surprised — it feels both like a long time and yet not that long at all. SQLite felt like it had been around forever when Rails adopted it to make development environments simpler, and I remember finding it easy to use when writing iPhone apps for the first time. It was remarkably stable at an early age, it seems. I still think it’s a shame we never got SQLite into the browser because every browser implemented the same backend and therefore “it wasn’t a standard” — https://www.w3.org/TR/webdatabase/ https://www.w3.org/TR/webdatabase/ (note the box in red) Chrome still supports it, but not in “modern” places like web workers: https://caniuse.com/#feat=sql-storage https://caniuse.com/#feat=sql-storage
justinclift 6y ago
Typo. 33 not 23.
zoomablemind 6y ago
What amazes me the most, it's a work by mostly 2-4 long-standing developers, with about 40 contributors through the history. On the other hand SQLite is being used by thousands of devs and likely billions of users (mobile at least).
qubex 6y ago
To be honest I’m quite surprised it’s already 20 years old. The first time I ever encountered SQLite was when poking through what made the very first iPhone tick, “way back” in 2007 (a whopping 13 years ago). Before then it had never occurred to me that one might use a database-as-an-executable as the generic information storage back-end for pretty much any application... I thought of SQL and databases as enterprise-type deployments and thought of applications as having custom data formats. Looking back, Wikipedia tells me that Apple had made CoreData available with Mac OS X 10.4 ‘Tiger’, released in mid-2005, so I wasn’t exactly up-to-date at the time... but still, it feels like a remarkably modern development. And an impressive one in any timeframe. EDIT: Grammar.

by sargun 6y ago

lstamour 6y ago

I’m also surprised — it feels both like a long time and yet not that long at all. SQLite felt like it had been around forever when Rails adopted it to make development environments simpler, and I remember finding it easy to use when writing iPhone apps for the first time. It was remarkably stable at an early age, it seems. I still think it’s a shame we never got SQLite into the browser because every browser implemented the same backend and therefore “it wasn’t a standard” — https://www.w3.org/TR/webdatabase/ https://www.w3.org/TR/webdatabase/ (note the box in red) Chrome still supports it, but not in “modern” places like web workers: https://caniuse.com/#feat=sql-storage https://caniuse.com/#feat=sql-storage

justinclift 6y ago

Typo. 33 not 23.

zoomablemind 6y ago

What amazes me the most, it's a work by mostly 2-4 long-standing developers, with about 40 contributors through the history. On the other hand SQLite is being used by thousands of devs and likely billions of users (mobile at least).

qubex 6y ago

To be honest I’m quite surprised it’s already 20 years old. The first time I ever encountered SQLite was when poking through what made the very first iPhone tick, “way back” in 2007 (a whopping 13 years ago). Before then it had never occurred to me that one might use a database-as-an-executable as the generic information storage back-end for pretty much any application... I thought of SQL and databases as enterprise-type deployments and thought of applications as having custom data formats. Looking back, Wikipedia tells me that Apple had made CoreData available with Mac OS X 10.4 ‘Tiger’, released in mid-2005, so I wasn’t exactly up-to-date at the time... but still, it feels like a remarkably modern development. And an impressive one in any timeframe. EDIT: Grammar.