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Comment by mmorearty | Hacker News Reader

I don't know much about RethinkDB yet, but I will say that I have been a big fan (online) of one of its founders, Slava Akhmechet, for years. I've never met him, but he wrote some terrific articles on his website, http://www.defmacro.org/ , a few years ago. Start at the bottom of the list of articles, with "The Nature of Lisp."

Slava is a deep thinker, which makes me very excited to take a look at RethinkDB.

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I wish I could up-vote this a thousand times. Slava is one of the most genuine founders I've met, and I wish him and RethinkDB all the best.

Indeed - he mentions in the article that he set himself a goal to convert 10 programmers into Lispers. Sounds like he probably has that many just in this thread! Kudos, sir!

He didn't make me a Lisper (I'm more a Haskell fan these days), but reading Slava's Lisp articles years ago was a significant part of what set me on my current career path.

He helped get me into functional programming, which got me a contract job [1], which is how I met one of my current co-founders.

[1] http://martin.kleppmann.com/2009/09/18/the-python-paradox-is...

So is RethinkDB written in Lisp?

No according the website it is written in C++.

And yet the Clojure guy did his distributed DB in Clojure (aka, Lisp).

Kind of makes me wonder why C++ was chosen...

I've joined RethinkDB just a couple of months ago, so I might not have all the historical facts right, but here is what I know.

In a previous incarnation RethinkDB was a highly optimized storage engine for SSDs implemented in C++ to be able to take full advantage of both low level SSD and kernel access.

The current distributed engine was built on top on this storage engine and I think it only made sense to continue with C++.

Originally, RethinkDB was to be a MySQL storage engine, which made C++ the natural choice.

They pivoted away from MySQL after my short stint in the beginning so I can't speak to why the storage code was kept (though I can't imagine it's because my code was so great they couldn't bear to throw it away).

Storage people tend to stick close to the metal, in general. This means C or C++ in most cases, for better or for worse.

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