Comment by francoismassot | Hacker News Reader

Comment by francoismassot | Hacker News Reader

Co-founder of Quickwit here. Seeing our acquisition by Datadog on the HN front page feels like a truly full-circle moment.

HN has been interwoven with Quickwit's journey from the very beginning. Looking back, it's striking to see how our progress is literally chronicled in our HN front-page posts:

- Searching the web for under $1000/month [0]

- A Rust optimization story [1]

- Decentralized cluster membership in Rust [2]

- Filtering a vector with SIMD instructions (AVX-2 and AVX-512) [3]

- Efficient indexing with Quickwit Rust actor framework [4]

- A compressed indexable bitset [5]

- Show HN: Quickwit – OSS Alternative to Elasticsearch, Splunk, Datadog [6]

- Quickwit 0.8: Indexing and Search at Petabyte Scale [7]

- Tantivy – full-text search engine library inspired by Apache Lucene [8]

- Binance built a 100PB log service with Quickwit [9]

- Datadog acquires Quickwit [10]

Each of these front-page appearances was a milestone for us. We put our hearts into writing those engineering articles, hoping to contribute something valuable to our community.

I'm convinced HN played a key role in Quickwit's success by providing visibility, positive feedback, critical comments, and leads that contacted us directly after a front-page post. This community's authenticity and passion for technology are unparalleled. And we're incredibly grateful for this.

Thank you all :)

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27074481

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28955461

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31190586

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32674040

[4] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35785421

[5] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36519467

[6] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38902042

[7] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39756367

[8] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40492834

[9] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40935701

[10] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42648043

I think you forgot to add the links

Anyway tantivy is great! I love pg_search https://www.paradedb.com/blog/introducing_search (which appears to be built by another company, but on top of tantivy, which is a great feature of open source)

Now, I am worried about development being stalled after this acquisition. How does further developing tantivy in the open helps Datadog's bottom line?

I love quickwit, unfortunately datadog has a history of murdering open source (e.g. vector.io halting development and never fixing gross bugs)

Yeah, a Vector dev that is now at Datadog told me that Vector is essentially deprecated.

(Disclaimer: datadog employee)

I joined Datadog after the Vector acquisition and now currently am the manager for the Community Open Source Engineering team that works on Vector open source.

It’s def. not deprecated, but it did take awhile to sort out. It’s not easy figuring out business vs giving away software for free.

Anyways, there’s quite a few issues and GitHub discussions everyday, in addition to Discord chats.

I'm using Vector for my own infrastructure and at work, at the time it seemed the best option to ship logs to various destinations. Are there any alternatives?

If you want to check out OpenTelemetry, Otel-collector does the same job - though it's tightly coupled to opentelemetry

On the contrary, It's quite active lately - https://vector.dev/releases/

pg_search dev here -- Thanks for mentioning us.

Re: Tantivy. I'm hopeful the community Paul and the Quickwit team have built on top of Tantivy will continue to flourish. I'm sure Datadog will build product(s) with Quickwit, which is built on Tantivy and will contribute to it. Many other companies like ours (ParadeDB) and other databases also integrate it. I can't speak for others, but we'll contribute whenever possible. We're currently working on supporting nested documents in Tantivy, for example, and hoping to upstream this work.

While it's reasonable to be concerned, I'd say this is a win for Quickwit, Tantivy and, of course, the well-deserving team behind them.

Congratulations! The fact you and your team managed to built Tantivy is a huge contribution to open source.

As someone who never managed to built a fond relationship with Apache Lucene based products (Solf, Elastic). I was extremely happy to see Tantivy in open source.

BM25 scoring, proper asian language support, speed, memory foot prints, etc - amazing job! Thank you so much!

https://github.com/quickwit-oss/tantivy

IMHO Datadog made a smart move!

If Tantivy itself just stays permanently under Apache2 licence and find a sustainable path to co exist with the rest of open source community - it's all good guys. You are more than deserve a commercial success.

Congrats!!

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