potygen VS sqlc

OMG this is one of my favorite tools paid for it all the way back when it went out. Have used it so many times just to write documentation for things like:

https://github.com/ivank/potygen/blob/main/packages/potygen/...

ASCII is just so versatile and allows you to put nice graphics in places where one does not expect, making things more easily understandable.

I also wrote a parser (in typescript) for postgres (https://github.com/ivank/potygen), and it turned out quite the educational experience - Learned _a lot_ about the intricacies of SQL, and how to build parsers in general.

Turned out in webdev there are a lot of instances where you actually want a parser - legacy places where they used to save things in plane text for example, and I started seeing the pattern everywhere.

Where I would have reached for some monstrosity of a regex to solve this, now I just whip out a recursive decent parser and call it a day, takes surprisingly small amount of code! (https://github.com/dmaevsky/rd-parse)

I used to agree 100% with this sentiment, as dissatisfaction with available ORMs at the time (early days of doctrine in PHP) drove me to actually write my own. Turned out an amazing exercise in why orms are hard.

Anyway a few years later I was in a position to start things fresh with a new project so thought to myself, great lets try to do things right this time - so went all the way in the other direction - raw sql everywhere, with some great sql analyzer lib (https://github.com/ivank/potygen) that would strictly type and format with prettier all the queries - kinda plugged all the possible disadvantages of raw query usage and was a breeze to work with … for me.

What I learned was that ORMs have other purposes - they kinda force you to think about the data model (even if giving you fewer tools to do so) With the amount of docs and tutorials out there it allows even junior members of the team to feel confident about building the system. I’m pretty used to sql, and thinking in it and its abstractions is easy for me, but its a skill a lot of modern devs have not acquired with all of our document dbs and orms so it was really hard on them to switch from thinking in objects and the few ways orms allows you to link them, to thinking in tables and the vast amounts of operations and dependencies you can build with them. Indexable json fields, views, CTEs, window functions all that on top of the usual relation theory … it was quite a lot to learn.

And the thing is while you can solve a lot of problems with raw sql, orms usually have plugins and extensions that solve common problems, things like soft delete, i18n, logs and audit, etc. Its easy even if its far from simple. With raw sql you have to deal with all that yourself, and while it can be done and done cleanly, still require intuition about performance characteristics that a lot of new devs just don’t possess yet. You need to be an sql expert to solve those in a reasonable manner m, just an average dev could easily string along a few plugins and call it a day. Would it have great performance? Probably not. Would it hold some future pitfalls because they did not understand the underlying sql? Absolutely! But hay it will work, at least for a while. And to be fair they would easily do those mistakes with raw sql as well, but with far few resources to understand why it would fail, because orms fail in predictable ways and there is usually tons of relevant blog posts and such about how to fix it.

It just allows for an better learning curve - learn a bit, build, fail, learn more, fix, repeat. Whereas raw sql requires a big upfront “learn” cost, while still going through the “fail” step more often than not.

Now I’m trying out a fp query builder / ORM - elixir’s ecto with the hopes that it gives me the best of both worlds … time will tell.

Hi HN, I’m Kyle and together with Andrew (https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=stanleydrew) we’ve been working on Riza (https://riza.io), a project to make WASM sandboxing more approachable. We’re excited to share a developer preview of our code interpreter API with HN.

There’s a bit of a backstory here. A few months ago, an old coworker reached out asking how to execute untrusted code generated by an LLM. Based on our experience building a plugin system for sqlc (https://sqlc.dev), we thought a sandboxed WASM runtime would be a good fit. A bit of hacking later, we got everything wired up to solve his issue. Now the API is ready for other developers to try out.

The Riza Code Interpreter API is an HTTP interface to various dynamic language interpreters, each running inside a WASM sandbox without access to the outside world (for now). We modeled the API to align with a POSIX shell-style interface.

We made a playground so you can try it out without signing up: https://riza.io

The API documentation lives here: https://docs.riza.io

There are many limitations at the moment, but we expect to rapidly expand capabilities so that programs can e.g. access the network and filesystem. Our roadmap has more details: https://docs.riza.io/reference/roadmap

If you need to execute LLM-generated code we’d love to have you try the API and let us know if you run into any issues. You can email us directly at [email protected].

"Is there a way to get sqlc to use pointers for nullable columns instead of the sql.Null types?"

I came across this yesterday for golang: https://sqlc.dev which is somewhat like what you want, maybe.

Not sure it allows you to parameterize table names but the basic idea is codegen from sql queries so you are working with go code (autocompletion etc).

Agreed, but tools like https://sqlc.dev, which I mention in the article, are a good trade-off that allows you to have verified, testable, SQL in your code.

sqlc is not strictly a conventional ORM. It offers a unique approach by generating Go code from SQL queries. This allows developers to write SQL, which sqlc then converts into type-safe Go code, reducing the boilerplate significantly. It ensures that your queries are syntactically correct and type-safe. sqlc is ideal for those who prefer writing SQL and are looking for an efficient way to integrate it into a Go application.

I was browsing awesome-go for ideas on how to setup my data access layer when I stumbled on sqlc. It seemed like a great option. Code generation is a strategy often used in the Go ecosystem and making my queries safe at compile time was an idea I really liked. Knex was great, but it required of me that I test thoroughly my queries at runtime and that I sanitize my query results to ensure type safety within my application.

Now, we are going to generate the code. For this purpose, we are going to use sqlc.

https://github.com/sqlc-dev/sqlc — for use with //go:generate