Hacker News Reader

Comment by kawsper | Hacker News Reader

I wonder if something like Realm.io will be adopted more widely https://realm.io/docs/swift/latest/

They seem to have adoption in some bigger companies, but I don't know if any of them are using the Swift version yet.

Last month, about 60% of our iOS users already used Swift, and the gap in favor of Swift is growing very quickly (it was 50/50 in November 2015). Some of our Swift users you’d probably expect: apps from Vimeo, Digg, Hipmunk or Misfit wearables. But in the past 1-2 months we’ve seen Swift + Realm apps from some real large companies like Cisco, the NFL, NBC Universal, GoDaddy and 7-Eleven. I hope this helps!

Very interesting stats. Thanks for sharing!

I'd love to use realm, but for now i'm still hesitating. One reason is that you're using your own custom storage engine, and building a reliable one is hard. You should release some jespen-like testbench to prove how robust your technology is.

I definitely agree that custom storage engines can be scary! In a way you could say the fact we’re used happily by so many applications on literally hundreds of millions of devices is a test of our reliability, although it’s far from being a formal test of course. We field the overwhelming majority of our issues in public on GitHub and StackOverflow, so you can see the kind of issues we have there. We have a bunch of internal testing on top of that of course, including our own device testing, test suites, and fuzz testing. We’re always up for recommendations on testbench for the kind of storage we do (Jepsen concerns itself only with distributed failure scenarios iirc, which doesn’t apply to us since we’re an embedded/centralized database engine by necessity). I don’t know if this helps or not, but I’m always happy to chat if there’s anything more you’d like to know about

One talk that really made me confident in using a new DB technology was this one :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4fFDFbi3toc&feature=youtu.be...

Maybe you could make videos and talks about your testing procedures. That would probably help build trust.

nb : you're not distributed, but you're enabling multi-threaded access, in an environment where your app can be killed anytime by the OS. That's quite hostile as well :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com