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Comment by arnath | Hacker News Reader

Why would you rewrite something that’s widely considered one of the best written and tested pieces of software in the world?

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Among many other things, they built a system that can provide substantially better concurrency and a better async story.

Also, they're building a project that's more open to outsiders.

They were aiming for better concurrency, I believe. If you're rewriting something regardless, might as well use a more modern language that's easier to reason about during development.

That's how you push the field forward. Good isn't good enough.

If yiu had the resources/time, why wouldn't you challenge or improve status quo?

Sqlite is excellent but I still have many gripes with it, especially around defaults.

Best tested..? The test data/suite is private. That alone is quite odd.

It's not odd at all if you understand the purpose of SQLite's governance model. Much better than letting VC + SV rat fuck everything for solitary monetary gain.

That explains why they don't accept code contributions. The test harness thing is just strange, they put out "certified" binaries for free but keep the test code closed.

That's basically the opposite of any other project where you pay to get support and a certified official build of the exact same code as open source releases, and if there's a private part it's paperwork you can show as proof of compliance for safety critical systems.

> It's not odd at all if you understand the purpose of SQLite's governance model.

The purpose of SQLite's governance model is to be a cult, that only accepts members who share the same religion.

The software happens to be good. Getting it away from that governance and turning it into an open community sounds great. And that can happen while still maintaining high standards.

No, this is just sour grapes because you clearly disagree with people that don't adhere to your ideology. Thank fuck for that, people like you are why devs get burnt out.

I meant "cult" quite literally, not hyperbolically. They literally filter acceptable developers based on religion.

I haven't heard a cult literally defined as "any group that filters based on their religion". The definition most people have is https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/cult which implies coercion, manipulation, extremism.

Can you explain your view more? Otherwise, this sounds like a motte-and-bailey game.

A church is commonly expected to filter on religion (somewhat, many welcome respectful outsiders). A software project filtering on religion is very different. One common aspect of cults is pervading every aspect of people's lives, including their work ("company store" style).

Full acknowledgement for the fact that the line between "religion" and "cult" is blurry, but "all developers of this project must share a common religion and agree to these monastic religious tenets" sure ticks some boxes on "extremism".

They are, of course, free to do so; freedom of association is their right. Others are free to judge them for it, and to question whether they should be using the resulting software. The license is open, the community is not. So, seeing a project come along that looks to build something more open (and it's really saying something when "project whose governance is owned by a company, but open to pull requests" is more open) seems like a positive step.

(Also, as a database project, surely they shouldn't be mixing church and state. ;) )

The Rust rewrite? I had the same question.

It’s fast, with unparalleled stability, arguably better managed than any other software on earth, deployed on literally everything, so let’s… fork it for street cred?

Rewriting in Rust is usually an exercise in reducing serious security vulnerabilities and memory bugs, not improving speed or stability.

But with LLMs and massive, human-written test suites, rewrites aren’t a bad idea like they used to be. Rust is a perfect target language because it’s compiler is so strict and surfaces issues in a way that’s easy for either humans or LLMs to use.

Something tells me the test suites won't be human written, for most of them. They probably won't be fully human reviewed even.

For existing, mature projects like SQLite, the tests are human-written.

Even if they weren’t, LLMs are pretty good at writing tests because of Github being in their training sets. I rarely find that their tests are bad unless I underspecified what the project is supposed to do.

Disclaimer that I only vibe-code for personal projects, so I haven’t tested this at business scale.

I think Richard Hipp has quipped “if you think you can build a better SQLite by god you’re welcome to try!”

I do not recall ever saying that.

Another way of describing Turso is a SQLite-compatible (same file format and C API) embedded database. If you start with SQLite but find you need async i/o, concurrent writers, and local replicas then Turso is a good option.

Because they wanted something like this story to happen. It's what VC does to open source, they aren't here to help or build communities they are here to make money. Nothing else matters.

it's funny, because money is the number 1,000 or even lower thing on my priorities.

Turso has a booming OSS community with many contributors from outside the company and is fully MIT.

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