potygen VS sqlite-fast

There was a saying that before learning postgres in depth, the db is just a dumb store of data for devs, once you spend time to learn the tools it provides though, most applications just look like a very thin layer on top of the sql.

There is so much more to rdbms (especially pg) than just joins - common table expressions, window functions, various views, let alone all the extensibility - extensions, custom types, even enums.

All of that can enable writing performant, type safe and very compact applications.

I am yet to see libs that embrace the elegance of it all - I’ve attempted this once - https://github.com/ivank/potygen but didn’t get much traction. I’m now just waiting for someone more determined to pick up those ideas - a client lib that exposes the type safety and intellisence at compile time and allows you to easily compose those sql queries.

I think this project has some ways to go to reach that though, but thankfully it is a step in the right direction.

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 think this is the sweet spot. Last time I worked with SQLite on .NET I wrote a wrapper library along those lines: https://github.com/zmj/sqlite-fast

A few years ago, I needed faster SQLite interop than Microsoft.Data.Sqlite, and ended up writing my own: https://github.com/zmj/sqlite-fast

The ergonomics could be better, but this enabled query execution to avoid heap allocations and reflection.