sqinn VS go-sqlite3

First part of the README that hasn't changed in 2 months:

> Sqinn-Go is a Go (Golang) library for accessing SQLite databases without cgo. It uses Sqinn https://github.com/cvilsmeier/sqinn under the hood. It starts Sqinn as a child process (os/exec) and communicates with Sqinn over stdin/stdout/stderr. The Sqinn child process then does the SQLite work.

> If you want SQLite but do not want cgo, Sqinn-Go can be a solution.

This seems pretty clear to me about what's happening. It makes an OS call to a third-party executable (sqinn), pipes the result from stdout back into the Go code. The advantage is you don't have to compile the C code alongside your Go code.

Honestly, I don't really know how much more clear the author could be. I guess if you don't know what stdin, stdout, and stderr are it might be confusing? It's hard to imagine that a programmer who is interested in this library isn't familiar with those concepts though.

I've not used it, but sqinn is one sqlite server meant specifically to be used by languages without c calling conventions:

https://github.com/cvilsmeier/sqinn

The latest supported version is 3.38.3: https://github.com/cvilsmeier/sqinn/releases/tag/v1.1.15

struggling figuring out how to make my cgo sqlite cross-compile to Windows

Plenty of people trying to fix that.

There's at least:

https://modernc.org/sqlite

Then there's https://github.com/zombiezen/go-sqlite that actually builds https://crawshaw.io/sqlite on top of modernc.

And there's mine that has both a low level and a database/sql driver builds and runs everywhere Go does: https://github.com/ncruces/go-sqlite3

If you're interested both SQLite's and my memdb VFSes implement safe locking.

Depending on your familiarity with Go, mine maybe easier to follow, or not.

https://github.com/ncruces/go-sqlite3/blob/f1b00a9944730eaa9...

One thing I tried to make sure, to avoid the pitfall modernc is having, is to make sure building "the WASM BLOB" is easily reproducible with widely available tools:

https://github.com/ncruces/go-sqlite3/blob/main/.github/work...

I do apply some light patches to SQLite, but so far they've always cleanly applied, and I can produce a new release within hours of being notified of SQLite releases.

Disclosure: I'm working on alternative Cgo-less bindings for SQLite, using wazero.

https://github.com/ncruces/go-sqlite3

One of the problems of the modernc approach (IMO) is that they're not just transpiring CPU/compute stuff, but entirely OS/platform stuff.

Each Go file of theirs is a xxx_os_arch.go that starts with 100s of OS-#defines-as-consts, and goes on to transpile fully #ifdefed code.

It also implements antithetical (in Go) stuff like goroutine local storage, because libc pthreads can't live without it.

And all IO is via direct syscalls that will never play nice with the Go scheduler, because, again this is OS level stuff.

WASM defines a cross platform CPU and an ABI, and using that for compute and the bottom OS layer in Go you get (IMO) a nicer end result.

Given the hard task of generating decent code from WASM at load time (wazero's compiler is pretty naive, a better one is being developed, but it will take seconds to generate good code for anything non trivial like SQLite) I wouldn't mind having a solution that translated to Go, or Go ASM, at build time.

The github.com/ncruces/go-sqlite3 is a link.

Using the stack pointer global is an interesting hack. I'd never thought of that. Need to compare with what I'm doing for SQLite (a kind of per connection arena).