trustfall VS join-monster

Pleasantly surprised to see Predrag show up as a reviewer, but at the same time not at all surprised:

- The [Firebase technical screen](https://startupandrew.com/posts/how-firebase-interviewed-sof...) would have been much easier with something like this, as it was Just Another Optimization Problem™. Part of me wants to try it again with Picat!

- He's doing other very interesting things with programming languages, e.g.: https://github.com/obi1kenobi/trustfall

Email: [email protected]

Hi, I'm u9g. I'm looking for an internship for either this winter (in a few weeks) or a summer internship!

Some things I've done:

I integrated a [query engine for lints](https://github.com/obi1kenobi/trustfall) (and contributed optimizations) into [OXC](https://github.com/oxc-project/oxc) (a new Rust-based Javascript Linter).

I wrote [several](https://github.com/u9g/money-lens) [toy](https://github.com/u9g/quickquestion/tree/main/extension) languages and syntax highlighting for them.

I also wrote a [js-to-scheme transpiler](https://github.com/u9g/js2scheme/blob/main/example.js).

Happy to work on things compiler or database oriented, but also happy to learn something new!

If you'd like to dig deeper, here are some links:

- cargo-semver-checks: https://github.com/obi1kenobi/cargo-semver-checks

- Trustfall query engine, which powers cargo-semver-checks: https://github.com/obi1kenobi/trustfall

- Trustfall playground, where you can query Rust library APIs in your browser -- for example, "which structs in `itertools` are importable by more than one path": https://play.predr.ag/rustdoc#?f=2&q=*3-Structs-importable-f...

- 10min conference talk on Trustfall: https://www.hytradboi.com/2022/how-to-query-almost-everythin...

I'm also giving a talk at P99 CONF in a few months about how Trustfall's new optimizations API made cargo-semver-checks over 2300x faster: https://twitter.com/PredragGruevski/status/16893002495908003...

No worries!

Trustfall is even more general than semver actually, one can use it to query any data source -- even HN itself:

https://play.predr.ag/HackerNews

Here's a link to that project if you'd like to check it out:

https://github.com/obi1kenobi/trustfall

I gave a 10min conference talk on it last year titled "How to query (almost) everything"

https://www.hytradboi.com/2022/how-to-query-almost-everythin...

I've had my eye on Taxi for a while, and it's neat! I agree that the problems it aims to solve are real and painful in real life.

In my experience, I'm not sure people care about schemas or schema languages — they are just implementation details best left under the hood. This is why in my own work, I started on the query end of the spectrum instead.

This is why I built Trustfall, a query engine able to query any data source: DBs, APIs, files like PDF, CSV, or JSON, or any combination of those.

GitHub: https://github.com/obi1kenobi/trustfall

Playground showing the query "which GitHub/Twitter users comment on HackerNews stories about OpenAI?": https://play.predr.ag/hackernews#?f=1&q=IyBDcm9zcyBBUEkgcXVl...

Here's an example adapter for querying RSS/Atom feeds. Here's an example adapter for querying the HackerNews APIs. Both projects also include a schema and example queries which you can run.

GraphQL could be efficiently translated into SQL and things certainly try, but the only thing close to a "bulletproof" implementation I found was Join Monster (https://github.com/join-monster/join-monster) in NodeJS-land and even that I think is now mostly abandoned. GraphQL as a system was built assuming random-access to data stores is ~free because that's what Facebook has, but the rest of us don't :)

REST is not a strict specification and it's not a single implementation, you can just start doing it.

That said, I wouldn't recommend going the allow everything flexible resolver way like GraphQL: it's terrible for performance (eg. most APIs use N+1 queries unless you have something like https://github.com/join-monster/join-monster), the complexity of the codebase skyrockets and having to specify all the fields you want is not exactly ergonomic in most situations.