Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Deep dive into Turso, the “SQLite rewrite in Rust”

kerkour.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

101–110 of 154 posts

Re: Deep dive into Turso, the “SQLite rewrite in Rust”

#101

Post by lmm »

CharlesW wrote: post #73
adamzwasserman wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMHO breaking free of SQLite's proprietary test suite is a bigger driver than C vs Rust. Turso's Limbo announcement says exactly that: they couldn't confidently make large architectural changes without access to the tests. The rewrite lets them build Deterministic Simulation Testing from scratch, which they argue can exceed SQLite's reliability by simulating unlikely scenarios and reproducing failures deterministical…

> IMHO breaking free of SQLite's proprietary test suite is a bigger driver than C vs Rust. I don't understand this claim, given the breadth and depth of SQLite's public domain TCL Tests. Can someone explain to me how this isn't pure FUD? "There are 51445 distinct test cases, but many of the test cases are parameterized and run multiple times (with different parameters) so that on a full test run millions of separate…

The test suite that the actual SQLite developers use to develop SQLite is not open-source. 51445 open-source test cases is a big number but doesn't really mean much, particularly given that evidently the SQLite developers themselves don't consider it enough to provide adequate coverage.

Re: Deep dive into Turso, the “SQLite rewrite in Rust”

#102

Post by 3eb7988a1663 »

MobiusHorizons wrote: post #43
hu3 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I too am weary of VC incentives but: 1) It's MIT licensed. Including the test suite which is something lacking in SQLite: https://github.com/tursodatabase/turso 2) They have a paid cloud option to drive income from: https://turso.tech/pricing

> 2) They have a paid cloud option to drive income from: I’ve been confused by this for a while. What is it competing with? Surely not SQLite, being client server defeats all the latency benefits. I feel it would be considered as an alternative to cloud Postgres offerings, and it seems unlikely they could compete on features. Genuinely curious, but is there any sensible use case for this product, or do they just catc…

The thing that cooks my noodle - who are these insane people who want to beta test a new database? Yes, all databases could have world destroying data loss/corruption, but I have significantly more confidence in a player than has been on the market for many years.

Re: Deep dive into Turso, the “SQLite rewrite in Rust”

#103

Post by shimman »

thisislife2 wrote: post #37
fulafel wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They're not aiming at replacing SQLite-in-C with SQLite-in-Rust, they're doing this so they can implement more additional functionality faster than with C's chainsaw-juggling-act semantics and the inability to access the proprietary SQLite test suite. See the features and roadmap at https://github.com/tursodatabase/turso

In other words, they are creating their own database and hitching on to the SQLite brand to market it. (That's fine though).

I don't think that's fine at all, it's quite a shitty thing to do hoenstly and I'm not surprised it's a VC backed company doing it.

Re: Deep dive into Turso, the “SQLite rewrite in Rust”

#104

Post by cozzyd »

imiric wrote: post #100
cozzyd wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there any VC-funded open source projects that didn't attempt rug pulls? (There must be, right?)

Grafana has been a pretty good steward of OSS. Whether you like their products or not, they've been able to balance the OSS and commercial offerings fairly well.

Yeah that's something I actually use quite a bit!

Re: Deep dive into Turso, the “SQLite rewrite in Rust”

#105

Post by shimman »

blibble wrote: post #34
gus_massa wrote: post #24

I was surprised that the test suit not open source. Some info in https://sqlite.org/testing.html It looks like some parts are open source and other not. Does anyone know more about the backstory? (It looks like one is a custom program that generate fuzz test. Do they sell it to others SQL engines?)

it's their business model it's free but if you want the compliance paperwork, you pay for it

Yeah but what about the poor VC startups that want to rat fuck the commons? Why won't anyone think of them?

Re: Deep dive into Turso, the “SQLite rewrite in Rust”

#106

Post by akagusu »

CodingJeebus wrote: post #27
ndiddy wrote: post #22

The thing that worries me the most about Turso is that rather than the small, stable team running SQLite, Turso is a VC backed startup trying to capitalize on the AI boom. I can easily see how SQLite's development is sustainable, but not Turso's. They're currently trying to grow their userbase as quickly as possible with their free open source offering, but when they have investors breathing down their necks asking a…

Completely agree, I'm looking at pretty much all software this way nowadays. We've all been around long enough to know that "free" VC-backed software always means "free... until it's in our interest to charge for it". And yet users will still complain about the rugpull in 2026, no matter how many times they've been through it. "Fool me once, shame on you"

I've lost the count of how many times people were fooled by VC backed companies in this forum.

Re: Deep dive into Turso, the “SQLite rewrite in Rust”

#107

Post by EdwardDiego »

curuinor wrote: post #94
cozzyd wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Are there any VC-funded open source projects that didn't attempt rug pulls? (There must be, right?)

metabase.com, but metabase is intended for business analyst types and is AGPL, with shenanigans for embedding and an enterprise edition thing

Man, I've seen the SQL Metabase emits, it's not great. Like, doing a massive join across 10 tables and selecting all the columns from all the tables - to only return the average of one column from one table.

Re: Deep dive into Turso, the “SQLite rewrite in Rust”

#108

Post by Ar-Curunir »

CharlesW wrote: post #73
adamzwasserman wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMHO breaking free of SQLite's proprietary test suite is a bigger driver than C vs Rust. Turso's Limbo announcement says exactly that: they couldn't confidently make large architectural changes without access to the tests. The rewrite lets them build Deterministic Simulation Testing from scratch, which they argue can exceed SQLite's reliability by simulating unlikely scenarios and reproducing failures deterministical…

> IMHO breaking free of SQLite's proprietary test suite is a bigger driver than C vs Rust. I don't understand this claim, given the breadth and depth of SQLite's public domain TCL Tests. Can someone explain to me how this isn't pure FUD? "There are 51445 distinct test cases, but many of the test cases are parameterized and run multiple times (with different parameters) so that on a full test run millions of separate…

There are also non-public tests.

Re: Deep dive into Turso, the “SQLite rewrite in Rust”

#109

Post by speed_spread »

koakuma-chan wrote: post #92
saidnooneever wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

where do you see these opportunities? i didnt see a lot of issues personally rust would be better at than C in this domain. care to elaborate? (genuinely curious!) personally i see more benefit in rust for example as ORM and layers that talk to the database. (those are often useful to have in such an ecossystem so you can use the database safe and sanely, like python or so but then u know, fast and secure.)

You need to be crazy to use an ORM. I personally think that even SQL is redundant. I would like to see a high quality embedded database written in Rust.

I vaguely remember a crate doing a RocksDB kind of thing?

Re: Deep dive into Turso, the “SQLite rewrite in Rust”

#110

Post by dang »

ivanjermakov wrote: post #88
dang wrote: post #86

Related. Others? Turso is an in-process SQL database, compatible with SQLite - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46677583 - Jan 2026 (102 comments) Beyond the SQLite single-writer limitation with concurrent writes - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45508462 - Oct 2025 (70 comments) An adventure in writing compatible systems - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45059888 - Aug 2025 (12 comments) Introducing th…

How SQLite is tested - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46303277

That's a classic! (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46306724) ... but too far from this particular topic to make sense on the list - otherwise we'd probably have to add all SQLite stories, which are legion.
Post reply on HN