esqueleto VS sqlc

Writing Haskell programs that rely on third-party packages is still an issue when it’s a not actively maintained package. They get out of date with the base library (Haskell’s standard library), and you might see yourself in a situation where you need to downgrade to an older version. This is not exclusive to Haskell, but it happens more often than I’d like to assume. However, if you only rely on known well-maintained libraries/frameworks such as Aeson, Squeleto, Yesod, and Parsec, to name a few, it’s unlikely you will face troubles at all, you just need to be more mindful of what you add as a dependency. There’s stackage.org now, a repository that works with Stack, providing a set of packages that are proven to work well together and help us to have reproducible builds in a more manageable way—not the solution for all the cases but it’s good to have it as an option.

However, we can use Esqueleto (”a bare bones, type-safe EDSL for SQL queries”) with Persistent's serialization to write type-safe SQL queries. It’s unlikely that you want to use Persistent by itself with SQL, so let’s use and review them together.

Postgresql-simple is a great library, it makes a nice use of overloaded strings to do the job. Some other nice libraries to keep an eye on are opaleye (postgres specific, which is equally nice but could be a bit difficult to get why the types are so big) and a combination of persistent (not DB specific! can work on postgres, sqlite, but also noSQL DBs like mongo, it's still easy to learn but you lose some things, such as joins due to the power of being agnostic) + esqueleto for type safe joins (be sure to look up the experimental package, it's a more comfortable syntax that will soon become the default one).

Using esqueleto in one of my haskell projects was a huge time sink and a major barrier to entry for colleagues.

In Haskell: https://hackage.haskell.org/package/esqueleto

Either it analyzes the given SQL to determine the in/out types of each SQL query, or it calls the database describe feature at compile-time.

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