radarroark

Pretty typical jaded HN comment there, chief. "This language's churn is more than I prefer -- why would anyone use it?" If you're not interested, just downvote and move on. Wondering out loud why anyone would actively use it ("for some reasons?") is a lame waste of bytes.

I want to go back to making desktop programs the way we used to before they turned into web apps that bundled chrome. I know I should just use Qt but I have some experience already with win32, and all the programs I have fond memories of are written with it (foobar2000, winamp, Everything, etc).

Anyone have experience with distributing win32 programs for Linux and/or MacOS by bundling wine? I take it that statically linking is out of the question, but I am guessing you could make an AppImage binary for linux that includes wine, and for MacOS you could include wine in the app bundle. I haven't tried either though. I'm interested in this so I can use win32 as a cross-platform desktop GUI library.

Not quite the same as the object serialization you'll find in many standard libraries, because xitdb can read/write data incrementally, so you can work with large-than-memory data sets.

> Point 1 may be a problem if you're embedded.

Large dependencies are not only a problem in embedded programming. That sort of thinking is how we got to the explosion of dependencies and software complexity we're in today.

> Object databases have their place, but so do fully normalized database tables.

Agreed, but you can build a stricter data model on top of generic data structures. The idea is to keep them separate rather than hard-coding just one specific data model. See for example running DataScript on top of xitdb: https://gist.github.com/radarroark/663116fcd204f3f89a7e43f52...

> Tracking versions of rows is useful. I would argue that "reverting" is not, since the reverting would be better tracked by adding a new version as a forward update.

"Adding a new version" to revert is exactly what xitdb does. See this line, which appends a new "version" of the database whose value points to an older version:

    history.append(history.getSlot(historyIndex));

It's fine if you don't find immutability useful directly, but it is also what enables reading the db while writes are happening, which is clearly useful even if you don't care about time travel.

The fastest approach is to just zero out the data. Alternatively you can rebuild the entire database while preserving only the data accessible in the latest copy of the db (kinda similar to SQLite's VACUUM command).

People are slow to realize the benefit of immutable databases, but it is happening. It's not just auditability; immutable databases can also allow concurrent reads while writes are happening, fast cloning of data structures, and fast undo of transactions.

The ones you mentioned are large backend databases, but I'm working on an "immutable SQLite"...a single file immutable database that is embedded and works as a library: https://github.com/radarroark/xitdb-java

Surprisingly, no it does not. Datomic has a more limited feature that lets you make an in-memory clone of the latest copy of the db for speculative writes, which might be useful for tests, but you can't take an arbitrary version of the db with as-of and use it as the basis for a new version on disk. See: https://blog.danieljanus.pl/2025/04/22/datomic-forking-the-p...

There's nothing technically that should prevent this if they are using HAMTs underneath, so I'm guessing they just didn't care about the feature. With HAMT, cloning any part of the data structure, no matter how nested, is just a pointer copy. This is more useful than you'd think but hardly any database makes it possible.

In theory, a database that uses immutable data structures (the hash array mapped trie popularized by Clojure) could allow instant clones on any filesystem, not just ZFS/XFS, and allow instant clones of any subset of the data, not just the entire db. I say "in theory" but I actually built this already so it's not just a theory. I never understood why there aren't more HAMT based databases.