There's nothing about being embeddable that's a limitation. All I really want is a lib I can link to that gives me an entry point to launch the database against a given folder, with some of the tweaks the postgres config file has, and that gives me a connection back. That entry point can launch however many threads it wants and behave exactly like postgres itself. After that my app can connect to a standard postgres and take advantage of all the features and performance.

We've been moving so much into web apps that optimizing for desktop apps like these is not a big concern these days. Sqlite ends up being used in that niche but it's extremely easy to run into it's limitations even in very simple personal usage. It's fine for what it is, an alternative to open(), but there are plenty of use cases where optimizing for fast open is not relevant.

Here's an example of where I'd really like postgres to replace sqlite:

https://github.com/pedrocr/syncer/

I've had to add an extra caching layer because of sqlite INSERT performance. Given that I've already had to code around limitations and the schema is simple I will probably end up using a simpler non-SQL database in the future instead.