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Comment by redwood | Hacker News Reader

Is there an example of a company that rewrote something popular in a faster / better language and built a successful business on that? I can think of ScyllaDB and Redpanda but aren't they struggling for the same reasons: not the default, faster horse, costly to maintain, hard to reach escape velocity

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You could make the case uv falls in this category (I just prefix all my pip commands with uv) though we have yet to see if astral will become a "successful business"; I'm hoping they pull it off.

I feel like there's numerous database companies that rewrote an existing database faster/with slightly better features and turned it into a successful product. Just about all of the successful ones really. It's a market where "build a faster horse" has been a successful strategy.

Certainly some of the newer succesful database companies are written in more modern languages (for example go with cockroachdb, go originally and now rust with influxdb) but it's wrong to call these (or really any language) faster than C/C++ just more productive languages to develop reliable software in...

I agree you see there's a lot in the database space I just don't know many have reached escape velocity more often they've raised a bunch of venture capital funding and plateau and then have a big problem

I have an impression that the two I named (cocroachdb, influxdb) are actually commercially successful, but I could be wrong.

I'm not sure how big of a factor it is, but scylla and red-panda are both source available, and VC funded, while the projects they are trying to replace are fully open source, and owned by a non-profit foundation. That probably isn't the only reason they are struggling, but it is a potential reason not to switch.

Granted, scylla used to be open source. And turso is VC funded and potentially vulnerable to a license change in the future.

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