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Nobody is feasibly going to rewrite Sqlite in Rust. Per (Genuine) curiosity why ? I know (good) database systems are hard to make but do sqlite have particular

by GaelFG 6y ago

Nobody is feasibly going to rewrite Sqlite in Rust. Per (Genuine) curiosity why ? I know (good) database systems are hard to make but do sqlite have particulary 'hard' part which are near impossible to replicate ? Especially since we now have a (I assume) well documented base implementation and an extensive test suite/history of error to avoid ? Is making à file based database that hard,compared to creating new programming language for exemple ?

fpoling 6y ago
The problem is to write a reliable file database. Firefox got a lot of bugs related to history file corruption until it was replaced with SQLite. The same story was with Subversion where they replaced Berkeley key DB due to reliability issues. This reliability comes from a very deep knowledge of OS API and all their corner cases. Creating a programming language typically involves less corner cases and the bugs in the compiler/runtime are much simple to reproduce (again, typically).
merijnv 6y ago
> Is making à file based database that hard,compared to creating new programming language for exemple ? Yes. I can hack together a trivial compiler in a weekend. A serious (non-optimising) compiler for a complex language is a task you could do in a few months. If you gave me two year I'm not sure I could implement a filesystem API that correctly did something as simple as "atomically append to a file". See also Dan Luu's writing on the topic of filesystems: https://danluu.com/deconstruct-files/ https://danluu.com/deconstruct-files/
colonwqbang 6y ago
Maybe it's not so much that it's impossible to do so. Perhaps there is just no reason to do so. Sqlite is one of the most battle-tested pieces of software in the world. It's used "everywhere" and it's performant. It is not the case, as some seem to believe, that rewriting software in Rust will magically eliminate all bugs and give a free speed boost compared to well-tested and optimised C.
ori_b 6y ago
It's more than 200,000 lines of code. Lua and its libraries are about 45,000 lines of code. So, yes.

by GaelFG 6y ago

fpoling 6y ago

The problem is to write a reliable file database. Firefox got a lot of bugs related to history file corruption until it was replaced with SQLite. The same story was with Subversion where they replaced Berkeley key DB due to reliability issues. This reliability comes from a very deep knowledge of OS API and all their corner cases. Creating a programming language typically involves less corner cases and the bugs in the compiler/runtime are much simple to reproduce (again, typically).

merijnv 6y ago

> Is making à file based database that hard,compared to creating new programming language for exemple ? Yes. I can hack together a trivial compiler in a weekend. A serious (non-optimising) compiler for a complex language is a task you could do in a few months. If you gave me two year I'm not sure I could implement a filesystem API that correctly did something as simple as "atomically append to a file". See also Dan Luu's writing on the topic of filesystems: https://danluu.com/deconstruct-files/ https://danluu.com/deconstruct-files/

colonwqbang 6y ago

Maybe it's not so much that it's impossible to do so. Perhaps there is just no reason to do so. Sqlite is one of the most battle-tested pieces of software in the world. It's used "everywhere" and it's performant. It is not the case, as some seem to believe, that rewriting software in Rust will magically eliminate all bugs and give a free speed boost compared to well-tested and optimised C.

ori_b 6y ago

It's more than 200,000 lines of code. Lua and its libraries are about 45,000 lines of code. So, yes.