libxev VS tigerbeetle

It scales to complex examples as well. Retained memory would be handled with its own allocator: for a large data structure like an LRU cache, one would initialize it with a pointer to the allocator, and use that internally to manage the memory.

Blocking (or rather, non-blocking, which is clearly what you meant) IO is a different story. Zig had an async system, but it had problems and got removed a couple point releases ago. There's libxev[0] for evented programs, from Mitchell Hashimoto. It's not mature yet but it offers a good solution to single-threaded concurrency and non-blocking IO.

I don't think Zig is the best choice for multithreaded programs, however, unless they're carefully engineered to share little to no memory (using message passing, for instance). You'd have to take care of locking and atomic ops manually, and unlike memory bugs, Zig doesn't have a lot of built-in support for catching problems with that.

A language with manual memory allocation isn't going to be the language of choice for writing web servers, for pretty obvious reasons. But for an application like squeezing the best performance out of a resource-constrained environment, the tradeoffs start to make sense.

[0]: https://github.com/mitchellh/libxev

io_uring support is obviously great & excellent, fulfills the "high performance" part well.

i was not expecting "Wasm + WASI" support at all. that's very cool. implementation is wasi_poll.zig (https://github.com/mitchellh/libxev/blob/main/src/backend/wa...). not to be unkind, but this makes me wonder very much if WASI is already missing the mark, if polling is the solution offered.

gotta say, this is some very understandable clean code. further enhancing my sense that i really ought be playing with zig.

You might be interested in a pure Zig implementation of these primitives by Mitchell in his libxev library: https://github.com/mitchellh/libxev

https://github.com/mitchellh/libxev

- one from the Tigerbeetle DB

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) :(