Programming

Why do we even need a server? Why can’t I pull this directly off the disk drive? That way if the computer is healthy enough, it can run our application at all, we don’t have dependencies that can fail and cause us to fail, and I looked around and there were no SQL database engines that would do that, and one of the guys I was working with says, “Richard, why don’t you just write one?” “Okay, I’ll give it a try.” I didn’t do that right away, but later on, it was a funding hiatus. This was back in 2000, and if I recall correctly, Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton were having a fight of some sort, so all government contracts got shut down, so I was out of work for a few months, and I thought, “Well, I’ll just write that database engine now.”

Gee, thanks Newt Gingrich and Bill Clinton?! Government shutdown leads to actual production of value for everyone instead of just making a better military vessel.

I had no idea the maintainers of sqlite were religious fanatics.

another one not mentioned there: sqlite is really tiny: (from https://sqlite.org/faq.html#q18 )

The default configuration of SQLite only supports case-insensitive comparisons of ASCII characters. The reason for this is that doing full Unicode case-insensitive comparisons and case conversions requires tables and logic that would nearly double the size of the SQLite library.

Their commitment to backwards compatibility, to the point of keeping a known bug that allows primary keys to be null, is both amazing and "wtf".

Here's a fun fact not noted in the article: Temporary files in sqlite are named etilqs_something in order to prevent people from contacting the sqlite developers for support when other applications (specifically, McAfee) have decided dump and not prune temp files.

Source: https://github.com/sqlite/sqlite/blob/95f6df5b8d55e67d1e34d2bff217305a2f21b1fb/src/os.h#L57

Hmm, well... I have never murdered anyone, not even once! Is that good enough for their Code of Ethics?

This article is written as though it is targeting FOSS newbie or something -- a weird mix of jargon and simple language designed to overawe someone.

Their VCS is at least as interesting as SQLite :)

There are over 600 lines of test code for every line of code in SQLite

Holy mother of god

I get it...I've never been the maintainer of a codebase that's deployed on trillions of devices, and backwards compatibility is something to be taken seriously and responsibly when you're that prolific. I do not begrudge SQLite or any large projects when they make decisions in service to that.

However

It always makes me feel oddly icky when known bugs (particularly of the footgun variety) become the new standard that the project intentionally upholds.

I'm glad to see i've been pronouncing it right all these years.

So nerdy, so good