What i know about SQLite today and me writing the only free book about it’s internals is a testimony of Glauber Costa’s vision. He was bold enough to undertake the un-thought of: forking a software tested on billions of devices and running on trillions. He got the heat on the orange site for it, it did not age well of course and they were clueless tenrecs for once.
My criticism of SQLite COC lies in it’s restricted nature. Though i don’t agree with 50 and 63 “Love chastity.”.
I always wanted to contribute to SQLite. And it was open they said. But to my dismay, it was closed with only the source available. A great label for this type of project is source open rather than open source. It’s high time people stop promoting SQLite as an OpenSource project.
People are free to define the scope and type of their projects, but they should also bear the response to it, simple. LibSQL was a great contender and still is, but it lacked the community push behind. People just could not related to what was ongoing or maybe C is not so appealing? Turso has Rust as it’s wand of choice.
Turso was bright enough to capitalize on Pekka’s complete Rust rewrite as open source figurehead.
Forking is disdained but, it’s in the spirit of OpenSource. Forking opens the doors to more contributors. One might argue that it splits the community and if all the contributors banded together in one project it would have been far better. True, except that everyone banding together reduces the amount of talents. Forking creates talents. On this i bet high on the future of SQLite.
My fear about Limbo by Pekka Enberg is stability. SQLite achieved world-class bug squashing by being deployed everywhere massively. Will Limbo be able to equate it ever? No, i don’t think so. But, Limbo has a hidden card: DST (Deterministic Simulation Testing). Ensuring that simulations produce the same output for a given input, makes testing repeatable and verified. I am amazed by TigerBeetle’s use of DST. This substitutes the need for crashing the software against a horde of users to ensure all is well and good.
But, maybe, secretly we are thankful to SQLite for keeping it closed and guarded by moral ashlars of good conduct. Without the gate-keeping we would probably not have the drive to bring about a revolution.