I love how they're reaching out to C# users (and conversely I love how MS is reaching out to Linux and OS X users by opening sourcing their CLR, giving away their IDE, integrating Node.js and JSX as first-class citizens, etc!) but Rethink-ers if you're reading this - I briefly perused your source code and to a C#'er (who has written his fair share of JS, both in the "Visual Studio ASP.NET and SharePoint" style, as well as the "node.js" style) -- this doesn't read like idiomatic C# at all. I'm sure it works well, but the API feels like someone who writes JS for a living was given a deadline to add this feature and tacked it on half-heartedly.

There's no reason in this day and age that you should be have any deps on stuff like Cygwin, which you claim you don't: >> You won’t find any POSIX compatibility layers or other similar hacks–RethinkDB uses native Windows APIs on the Windows platform. It looks like you do[1] from the whole Cygwin section and the env var's you have to add to PATH (in a somewhat inelegant way). That dependency "tree" is... extensive to say the least and a lot of it can be eliminated or eased with a combination of NuGet and chocolatey. Having in your instruction notes to build Goog's RE2:

>> Build it somehow (I forgot to record how) [2]

doesn't really make me too confident that you're going to support Windows as a first party platform.

The API exposed to the end-user should be conventionally written in a more LINQ-y way - I.e. Fluent style code should be written with Object.Blah().Filter(x => x % 2).ToList() or whatever. Just little idiomatic things like that are pretty pervasive.

Regardless, thanks for investing the time on working for this. As a curmudgeon and someone who spends his spare time reading journal papers in the ACM about concurrency models from hardware transactional locks to ICFP papers which implement similar concepts on the exact opposite side of the spectrum, it's my duty to be wary of new technologies and slow to adopt them into production-- but RDB and VoltDB are two products I really think are technically sound. Contact me if you want a more thorough critique to make this more idiomatic, because your product really is great!

[1] https://github.com/rethinkdb/rethinkdb/blob/a90bb08051603621... (Errata: see edit)

[2] See [1]: RE2

Edit: I was referring to this revision of Windows.md, which at the time was what was available on their master branch. My critique largely revolves around that version. Proceeding my post, another branch's version was swapped in, to a more clean version in which the build phases of the dependencies are removed, and replaced with pre-compiled binaries as you now see: https://github.com/rethinkdb/rethinkdb/blob/next/WINDOWS.md This solves the aesthetics issue but just pushes the problem into another domain. You're using binary deps (some of which are cygwin'd afaik, but I haven't taken IDA to it so I can't say definitively) but if you want to build from "source" a la the FreeBSD ports way -- where every single .c or .cc is available for one to see and modify as their environment demands -- the problem's still there just pushed under the rug.