sqlc VS sqlx

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

sqlx for the database driver.

We've always used https://github.com/jmoiron/sqlx which is just the standard package + mapping to/from structs.

You can use this https://github.com/jmoiron/sqlx

I will be using sqlx to execute queries and map columns to struct fields and vice versa, sqlx is a library which provides a set of extensions on go's standard database/sql library.

sqlx + squirrel ftw

I'd rather suggest the use of tools more aligned with the core concepts of the language such as sqlx, which is an extension of the database/sql standard library. It allows you to use models/structs to map your tables but you have more control over the SQL statements you use to perform queries and the like. You can combine sqlx with Squirrel to build queries from composable parts.

IDE: use whatever make you productive. I personally use vscode. VCS: git, as golang communities use github heavily as base for many libraries. AFAIK Linter: use staticcheck for linting as it looks like mostly used linting tool in go, supported by many also. In Vscode it will be recommended once you install go plugin. Libraries/Framework: actually the standard libraries already included many things you need, decent enough for your day-to-day development cycles(e.g. `net/http`). But here are things for extra: - Struct fields validator: validator - Http server lib: chi router , httprouter , fasthttp (for non standard http implementations, but fast) - Web Framework: echo , gin , fiber , beego , etc - Http client lib: most already covered by stdlib(net/http), so you rarely need extra lib for this, but if you really need some are: resty - CLI: cobra - Config: godotenv , viper - DB Drivers: sqlx , postgre , sqlite , mysql - nosql: redis , mongodb , elasticsearch - ORM: gorm , entgo , sqlc(codegen) - JS Transpiler: gopherjs - GUI: fyne - grpc: grpc - logging: zerolog - test: testify , gomock , dockertest - and many others you can find here

This is the same situation I saw 20 years ago. Back then, all the managers were pushing development in Oracle tools. Those managers grew up on Oracle and Java was too modern for them. Now the situation is similar. Managers used to do things in Java and now they are still pushing Java. In fact, today Java brings nothing but problems. When I see a new project starting on Java it is always some big desperation. For a comparison of Java and Go, just look at the documentation for SQL. For go: https://pkg.go.dev/database/sql (31 pages) and maybe https://jmoiron.github.io/sqlx/ (12 pages). In Java only one class is 59 pages (https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/api/java/sql/ResultSet.html) and look how many of those documents there are: https://docs.oracle.com/en/java/javase/13/docs/api/java.sql/java/sql/package-summary.html and on top of that we have javax.sql - https://docs.oracle.com/javase/8/docs/api/javax/sql/package-summary.html And even then you use Hibernate for example, where the documentation has 11 manuals and of those the User Guide has 353 pages - https://docs.jboss.org/hibernate/orm/6.2/userguide/html\_single/Hibernate\_User\_Guide.html