Don’t get me wrong though, it would be a really awesome product with my dream feature set if they can actually pull it off. I wish them the best of luck and it will be very interesting see where SurrealDB ends up in a few years time!
True and if you look inside the code you can see the stated features are a result of underlying engine from those smart people (TiKV [0] in C and rust from pingcap). Surrealdb is standing on shoulders of giants at present, they are TiKV, FoundationDB and rocksdb. The feature set they mentioned mostly coming from TiKV at present.
May be 20-30 years down the line, if it stays may be enough OS and libraries are built in native Rust without C then it might displace it, but at the moment Rust depends on C.
Right now Go is miles ahead of Rust when it comes to libraries and ecosystem. So it needs to catch up and once it overcomes Go popularity it might be nearer to C++. C is a different beast and will continue to be there it's the lingua franca of hardware programming and abstraction, unless something simpler comes and takes over which will also be 2-3 decades.
I'm not sure that's true. A couple of years ago sure, but Rust is growing very fast.
I also think there's no reason to think C will stay around forever. The C ABI will be the lingua franca, but that doesn't mean you need to actually use C.
The only reason it has persisted for so long is lack of alternatives, but now we have at least Zig and Rust. Obviously there's a ton of momentum so it will still take a while to be replaced but I wouldn't be surprised if e.g. musl switches to Zig or Rust fairly soon.
I am sure its true, given Kubernetes, Docker and related projects, CockroachDB, prometheus, influxdb, nomad, otto, consul, grafana, terraform, snap, juju, Caddy, SeaweedFS, minio, milvus, syncthing, cilium are some of the examples in Go. Indeed it will be safe to say Go is one of the prominent language like Java, Python, C, C++ powering the internet. Rust still has a mountain to cross to reach even half as much usage as Go, except TiKV, Rust itself and Servo I don't see large open source software in Rust yet.
There is a lot of talk about it on HN and may be given 20-30 years it might become more widespread. Rust is still recovering from its failure of Servo not being used by Mozilla, given it failed to live up to expectations of replacing C++ in Firefox due to performance issues and resolving them within time constraints of project budget.
At the moment (as you have noted) the underlying storage engine is RocksDB (in single mode) or TiKV (in distributed mode), however, although we will always support deployment on top of these solutions, we intend to add our own embedded and distributed key-value stores in due course, which will offer different functionality in the long run!
We're looking to improve our roadmap page really soon to show exactly what we have planned / working on in the near term. In the meantime our features page https://surrealdb.com/features shows details most of the functionality that is already built, or coming in the future.