tigerbeetle VS facil.io

I'm waiting for someone to implement the Redis API by swapping out the state machine in TigerBeetle (which was built modularly such that the state machine can be swapped out).

https://tigerbeetle.com/

I fully agree with what Prime says at the end - Joran has really set a new bar here for all future database presentations.

Hearing that the entire TigerBeetle domain logic lives in a single file [0] (and is intended to be pluggable for other OLTP use cases!) makes it 1000% more tempting to spend the weekend getting up to speed with Zig.

[0] https://github.com/tigerbeetle/tigerbeetle/blob/main/src/sta...

Why would you want to build your own accounting ledger from scratch? Accounting is a completely new domain for most engineers, and TigerBeetle (https://tigerbeetle.com/) already solves this problem.

Maelstrom [1], a workbench for learning distributed systems from the creator of Jepsen, includes a simple (model-checked) implementation of Raft and an excellent tutorial on implementing it.

Raft is a simple algorithm, but as others have noted, the original paper includes many correctness details often brushed over in toy implementations. Furthermore, the fallibility of real-world hardware (handling memory/disk corruption and grey failures), the requirements of real-world systems with tight latency SLAs, and a need for things like flexible quorum/dynamic cluster membership make implementing it for production a long and daunting task. The commit history of etcd and hashicorp/raft, likely the two most battle-tested open source implementations of raft that still surface correctness bugs on the regular tell you all you need to know.

The tigerbeetle team talks in detail about the real-world aspects of distributed systems on imperfect hardware/non-abstracted system models, and why they chose viewstamp replication, which predates Paxos but looks more like Raft.

[1]: https://github.com/jepsen-io/maelstrom/

[2]: https://github.com/tigerbeetle/tigerbeetle/blob/main/docs/DE...

> There is no reason to use a memory unsafe language anymore, except legacy codebases, and that is also slowly but surely diminishing. I'm still yet to hear this amazingly compelling reason that you just need memory unsafe languages. In terms of cost/benefits analysis, memory unsafety is literally all costs.

Tell that to the authors of new memory unsafe languages (like Zig) and creators of new project in those languages (like https://tigerbeetle.com) :(

Most of the speed I believe is from using the server iodine https://github.com/boazsegev/iodine which is a wrapper around facil.io https://facil.io that is built using C.

Seeing this, and the use of zig for https://github.com/tigerbeetledb/tigerbeetle I wonder if zig might become a good tradeoff vs rust for servers if in long term it's more readable and maintainable and with a different approach to quality.

I would also be interested to hear the compile time, binary size and memory usage of those example apps.

Looks like the underlying facil.io library hasn't seen any commits since 2021, so that's a bit of a red flag. https://github.com/boazsegev/facil.io

I don't have a use-case for these C web frameworks, but a quick google search yielded facil.io which appears to be a collaborative project with a much stronger codebase, better documentation, less janky APIs and should likely be the one most people gravitate to.

?

Looks interesting.

There’s also facil[0], and h20 (though the latter is more of a standalone thing, it seems).

It might be fun to try to build something on top of them in something like Chicken Scheme or Janet.

[0] https://facil.io/

facil.io - Mini-framework for web applications. Includes a fast HTTP and Websocket server, and also supports custom protocols. MIT