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

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

#41

Post by adamzwasserman »

fulafel wrote: post #29
Havoc wrote: post #18

I’d imagine this will go a bit like the rust rewrite of sudo etc. Despite the memory safety advantages at least towards the start it still ends up more fragile because the incumbent has years of testing and fixing behind it

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

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 deterministically.

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

#42

Post by g947o »

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…

I was excited about this for a second until seeing your comment.

Unless you are Amazon which has the resources to maintain a fork (which is questionable by itself with all the layoffs), you probably shouldn't touch this.

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

#43

Post by MobiusHorizons »

hu3 wrote: post #38
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…

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 catch people who read SQLite was good on hacker news, but didn’t understand any of the why.

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

#44

Post by adamzwasserman »

tracker1 wrote: post #35
Havoc wrote: post #18

I’d imagine this will go a bit like the rust rewrite of sudo etc. Despite the memory safety advantages at least towards the start it still ends up more fragile because the incumbent has years of testing and fixing behind it

I definitely wouldn't be surprised by bugs and/or compatibility issues over time. Especially in the near term. I'm mixed, but somewhat enthusiastic on Turso's efforts to create client-server options and replication. In the past I've reached for FirebirdSQL when I needed local + external databases and wanted to limit the technology spread... In the use case, as long as transactions synched up even once a week it was e…

Building a production app on Turso now. No bugs or compatibility issues so far. The sqlite API isn't fully implemented yet, so I wrote a declarative facade that backfills the missing implementations and parallels writes to both Turso and native sqlite: gives me integrity checking and fallback while the implementation matures

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

#45

Post by w-m »

bathtub365 wrote: post #33
w-m wrote: post #19

At the current rate of progress I'm wondering how long it will take for llm agents to be able to rewrite/translate complete projects into another language. SQLite may not be the best candidate, due to the hidden test suite. But CPython or Clang or binutils or... The RIIR-benchmark: rewrite CPython in Rust, pass the complete test suite, no performance regressions, $100 budget. How far away are we there, a couple month…

What’s the point?

A clearly defined/testable long-horizon task: demonstrating the capability of planning and executing projects that overrun current llm's context windows by several orders of magnitude.

Single-issue coding benchmarks are getting saturated, and I'm wondering when we'll get to a point where coding agents will be able to tackle some long-running projects. Greenfield projects are hard to benchmark. So creating code or porting code from one language to another for an established project with a good test suite should make for an interesting benchmark, no?

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

#46

Post by tcfhgj »

g947o wrote: post #40
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

Elasticsearch was license under Apache 2.0 until they switched. That says enough.

to AGPL3?

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

#47

Post by koverstreet »

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…

Yeah, that's not a good environment for this kind of engineering. You need long term stability for a project like this, slow incremental development with a long term plan, and that's antithetical to VC culture.

On the other hand, Rust code and the culture of writing Rust leads to far more modularity, so maybe some useful stuff will come of it even if the startup fails.

I have been excited to see real work on databases in Rust, there are massive opportunities there.

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

#48

Post by groundzeros2015 »

fulafel wrote: post #29
Havoc wrote: post #18

I’d imagine this will go a bit like the rust rewrite of sudo etc. Despite the memory safety advantages at least towards the start it still ends up more fragile because the incumbent has years of testing and fixing behind it

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

Without the test suite isn’t even more likely to have stability problems?

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

#49

Post by evertheylen »

duped wrote: post #26
roywiggins wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

pglite runs in wasm so it should be possible to embed it where you want, like sqlite?

Why would I want wasm for an embedded database? It's not a feature, quite an anti-feature frankly. edit: it looks like pglite is only useful for web apps

Not really, I used it to develop against a "real" postgres database for a node backend app. It worked fine and made it pretty easy to spin up a development/CI environment anywhere you want. Only when inserting large amounts of data you start to notice it is slower than native postgres. I had to stop using it because we required the postgis extension (although there is some movement on that front!).

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

#50

Post by mhh__ »

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…

Some lessons about the modern distaste for copyleft here IMO
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