bitcoin-bash-tools VS tigerbeetle

In a way I feel that everything is an alternative to everything and at the same time nothing is.

As you said it all depends on the circumstances. But I don't really see Zig competing with Go. They both can do mostly the same things, but they both approach them from quite a different sides.

For example bash is being used in:

- gaming (https://github.com/JosefZIla/bash2048)

- web apps (https://github.com/avleen/bashttpd)

- networking

- CLIs

- distributed systems (https://github.com/frameable/aviary.sh)

- crypto (https://armedia.com/blog/blockchain-program-written-bash/ https://github.com/grondilu/bitcoin-bash-tools)

- systems programming (https://github.com/damphat/kv-bash)

- language tooling

Some of those make more sense than others. However we all talk about a mythical general case. For every language there are niches that are covered by it more significantly. For Go it would probably be web backend. It doesn't mean it is only suited to this one niche, it is used in everything. In general it is used there more. I don't believe that Rust sees the most use in the same niche to the same order that Go sees it.

Is Rust or Zig an alternative to php, awk or Lisp? In practice I don't really think so.

I guess it all depends on one's definition of "alternative". I don't think that a statistical Go programmer would see Zig as a real alternative. Statistical C programmer might see it as a Go alternative, but that probably would not be a question he would ask.

I'm waiting for someone to implement the Redis API by swapping out the state machine in TigerBeetle (which was built modularly such that the state machine can be swapped out).

https://tigerbeetle.com/

I fully agree with what Prime says at the end - Joran has really set a new bar here for all future database presentations.

Hearing that the entire TigerBeetle domain logic lives in a single file [0] (and is intended to be pluggable for other OLTP use cases!) makes it 1000% more tempting to spend the weekend getting up to speed with Zig.

[0] https://github.com/tigerbeetle/tigerbeetle/blob/main/src/sta...

Why would you want to build your own accounting ledger from scratch? Accounting is a completely new domain for most engineers, and TigerBeetle (https://tigerbeetle.com/) already solves this problem.

Maelstrom [1], a workbench for learning distributed systems from the creator of Jepsen, includes a simple (model-checked) implementation of Raft and an excellent tutorial on implementing it.

Raft is a simple algorithm, but as others have noted, the original paper includes many correctness details often brushed over in toy implementations. Furthermore, the fallibility of real-world hardware (handling memory/disk corruption and grey failures), the requirements of real-world systems with tight latency SLAs, and a need for things like flexible quorum/dynamic cluster membership make implementing it for production a long and daunting task. The commit history of etcd and hashicorp/raft, likely the two most battle-tested open source implementations of raft that still surface correctness bugs on the regular tell you all you need to know.

The tigerbeetle team talks in detail about the real-world aspects of distributed systems on imperfect hardware/non-abstracted system models, and why they chose viewstamp replication, which predates Paxos but looks more like Raft.

[1]: https://github.com/jepsen-io/maelstrom/

[2]: https://github.com/tigerbeetle/tigerbeetle/blob/main/docs/DE...

> There is no reason to use a memory unsafe language anymore, except legacy codebases, and that is also slowly but surely diminishing. I'm still yet to hear this amazingly compelling reason that you just need memory unsafe languages. In terms of cost/benefits analysis, memory unsafety is literally all costs.

Tell that to the authors of new memory unsafe languages (like Zig) and creators of new project in those languages (like https://tigerbeetle.com) :(