C Is Best (2025)

Plain and simple C is, by far, one of the current _LESS WORSE_ performant alternatives which can be used, actually, from low level to large applications.

C syntax is already waaaaay to rich and complex (and ISO is a bit too much pushing feature creep over 5/10 years cycles).

Re: C Is Best (2025)

#5

Post by hbbio » Tue, Jan 06, 2026, 1:27 PM UTC

Makes a lot of sense for SQLite to be written in C. It's a heavily optimized and debugged database implementation: Just look at btree.c with all its gotos :)

The only language that would make sense for a partial/progressive migration is zig, in huge part due to its compatibility with C. It's not mentioned in the article though.

Re: C Is Best (2025)

#6

Post by graphviz » Tue, Jan 06, 2026, 1:28 PM UTC

Absolutely.

Re: C Is Best (2025)

#7

Post by klaussilveira » Tue, Jan 06, 2026, 1:28 PM UTC

> Rust needs a mechanism to recover gracefully from OOM errors.

Linus also brought this up: https://lkml.org/lkml/2021/4/14/1099

Re: C Is Best (2025)

#8

Post by ForHackernews » Tue, Jan 06, 2026, 1:29 PM UTC

There's already attempted re-implementations of SQLite in Rust, so if it really is a good approach, time should tell.

https://turso.tech/blog/introducing-limbo-a-complete-rewrite...

Re: C Is Best (2025)

#9

Post by silon42 » Tue, Jan 06, 2026, 1:29 PM UTC

klaussilveira wrote: post #7

> Rust needs a mechanism to recover gracefully from OOM errors. Linus also brought this up: https://lkml.org/lkml/2021/4/14/1099

He's not wrong, but needs to clean own house a bit.

Re: C Is Best (2025)

#10

Post by enricozb » Tue, Jan 06, 2026, 1:30 PM UTC

The final comments in this text seem sobering and indicate an openness to change. I worked recently on a project to migrate RediSearch to Rust, and this was partially motivated by a decent number of recent CVEs. If SQLite doesn't have this problem, then there needs to be some other strong argument for moving to Rust.

I also think it's important to have really solid understandings (which can take a few decades I imagine) to understand the bounds of what Rust is good at. For example, I personally think it's unclear how good Rust can be for GUI applications.