tigerbeetle VS zig

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) :(

When writing code in a scripting language, sometimes you need that extra bit of performance (or maybe an async feature from Zig).

NodeJS is by no means a slow runtime, it wouldn’t be so popular if it was. But compared to Bun, it’s slow. Bun was built from the ground up with speed in mind, using both JavascriptCore and Zig. The Bun team spent an enormous amount of time and energy trying to make Bun fast, including lots of profiling, benchmarking, and optimizations.

ntdll.dll!RtlUserThreadStart()

There are valid reasons to use APIs from NTDLL. Where I disagree with zig#1840 is the idea that it is always better to use NTDLL versions of API. Every other software ecosystem uses the standard Win32 APIs and diverging from that without a good reason seems like a good way to have unexpected behavior. One concrete example is most users and programmers expect Windows to redirect some file system paths when running on WOW64. But this is implemented in Kernel32, not ntdll.

https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/11894

Zig also has an IRC channel on libera (#zig) that is moderated by Andrew Kelley.[1]

[1] https://github.com/ziglang/zig/wiki/Community

1. ZIG - $103,611

ESP32 and STM32 support is very welcome!

I have been following https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/5467 for a while and progress seemed to have slowed significantly

I have never used it directly, take what I say with a grain of salt.

As far as I know at least part of the idea was to eliminate the function coloring problem by letting the compiler do some nifty compile-time deductions. This had some issues (I don't know if this is still planned, it seems like the kind of thing that should not work in practice). Additionally, there were all sorts of hard technical issues with LLVM, debugging, etc.

I recommend checking the issue tracker, eg. https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/6025

I personally don't understand the domain well enough at all, but honestly, I feel like (if possible) Zig should try to double down on its allocator approach.

Instead of trying to use some compile-time deduction magic explicitly pass around an "async runtime/executor" struct which you explicitly have to interact with. Why not?

Yes, fundamentally. In Rust if you take a parameter of generic type T without any bounds, you cannot call anything on it except for things which are defined for all types. If you specify bounds, only things required by the bounds can be called (+ the ones for all types). Another difference is where you get an error when you try pass something which doesn't adhere to a certain trait. In Rust you will get an error at the call site, not at the place of use (except if you don't specify any bounds).

Zig is doing just fine without any trait mechanism and it simplifies the language a lot but it does come up from time to time. The usual solution is to just get type information via @typeInfo and error out if the type is something you're not expecting [0]. Not everybody is happy about it though [1] because, among other things, it makes it more difficult to discover what the required type actually is.

[0] https://github.com/ziglang/zig/blob/b3aed4e2c8b4d48b8b12f606...

[1] https://github.com/ziglang/zig/issues/17198