Comment by jorangreef | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jorangreef | Hacker News Reader

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Joran, creator and CEO from TigerBeetle here!

At a national level, we’re working with the Gates Foundation to integrate TigerBeetle into their non-profit central bank switch that will be powering Rwanda’s National Digital Payments System 2.0 later this year [1].

At an enterprise level, TigerBeetle already powers customers processing 100M+ transactions per month in production, and we recently signed our first $2B fintech unicorn in Europe with a few more in the US about to close. Because of the move to realtime transaction processing around the world [2] there’s been quite a bit of interest from companies wanting to move to TigerBeetle for more performance.

Finally, to your question, some of the founders of Clear Street, a fairly large brokerage on Wall Street have since invested [3] in TigerBeetle.

[1] https://mojaloop.io/how-mojaloop-enables-rndps-2-0-ekash/

[2] https://tigerbeetle.com/blog/2024-07-23-rediscovering-transa...

[3] https://tigerbeetle.com/company

Have you had a difficult time convincing customers to use a product written in a pre-1.0 programming language?

From the user's perspective, this doesn't matter at all. Zig is implementation detail, what we actually ship is a fully statically linked native executable for the database, and "links only libc" (because thread locals!) .a/.so native "C" library for clients. Nothing will change, for the user, if we decide to rewrite the thing in Rust, or C, or Hare, nothing Zig-specific leaks out.

Form the developer perspective, the big thing is that we don't have any dependencies, so updating compiler for us is just a small amount of work once in a while, and not your typical ecosystem-wide coordination problem. Otherwise, Zig's pretty much "finished" for our use-case, it more or less just works.

Zig's pre-1.0 status also refers more to API stability. The language and tooling already has more quality, at least in my own experience, than if we had picked C, which was the only other choice available to us when we made the decision to invest in Zig's trajectory back in 2020, given we needed to do static allocation and that any sort of global allocator was out of the question.

But, no. On the commercial side, I don't think we've had one conversation with a prospect or CTO or engineering team where they were concerned that we picked a systems language for the next thirty years. And while Zig is a beautiful, perfect replacement for C, I think the real reason the question has never come up, is that our customers come to us instead of us to them. We're not trying to convince anyone. They're already appreciating the extensive end-to-end testing we do on everything we ship.

However, I should emphasize again, that given all the assertions, fuzzing and DST we do, Zig's quality can't be overstated. It holds up.

> some of the founders of Clear Street, a fairly large brokerage on Wall Street have since invested [3] in TigerBeetle

"Invested" in terms of "giving you money" or in terms of "Now uses the database themselves"? I read it as the first, but I think the question is about usage, not investments.

Both. In terms of investing and planning to migrate.

Thanks for the clarification :)

You too! :)

I work on the ledgering system at clear street and as far as I know we have no plans to do this. We evaluated it internally a few years ago and found that the account and transaction model was too different from ours to migrate over.

Hi Thomas, yes, I was there. However, this is something that Sachin and I subsequently discussed last year (Sachin recently provided the TPS footnote to be used in the report here). However, I understand that roadmap may since have changed, but this is to the best of my knowledge.

Hi -- Sachin here, one of the founders of Clear Street. To clarify:

- The investment in TigerBeetle was done personally, not through Clear Street.

- I'm no longer actively involved day-to-day as CTO at Clear Street, but while I was, TigerBeetle was a solution we very much had in mind as our volumes were increasing.

That said, roadmaps change, priorities shift, etc. If TigerBeetle existed when we started Clear Street, I very much would have used it, and saved me from many headaches.

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