wa-sqlite VS Pentive

The word on the street is that https://github.com/rhashimoto/wa-sqlite is nearly production ready, closing in on the neat 1.0.0 release, with its IDBBatchAtomic engine highly recommended at https://www.powersync.com/blog/sqlite-persistence-on-the-web. You can try out the benchmark https://rhashimoto.github.io/wa-sqlite/demo/benchmarks.html.

And the other contestant is Dexie, stable https://dexie.org/.

If you were to branch into a new venture today, which one would you pick? And why?

It seems indeed very nice, the examples are clear and everything works from async. I tried with Deno, and now experimenting with my own VFS.

It does seem to suffer from maintainer problems too though, and I don't blame Roy Hashimoto for that. I wouldn't want to maintain such an obvious wrapper when it should be a task for SQLite's team to upstream the changes.

Roy Hashimoto doesn't want to maintain it as an NPM package for instance, as it is just an experiment: https://github.com/rhashimoto/wa-sqlite/issues/12

"Low traffic is a happy place - I don't have any motivation to mess with that."

This is the WASM blob and it's 1.1 MB uncompressed. https://github.com/rhashimoto/wa-sqlite/blob/master/dist/wa-.... No issues - it's cached by cloudflare.

We're using IndexedDB. Here's a writeup on alternatives https://github.com/rhashimoto/wa-sqlite/issues/85 and a benchmark https://rhashimoto.github.io/wa-sqlite/demo/benchmarks.html

I have a genuine appreciation for how Linear has built this. We have had to build something similar for our note taking application (Reflect). It is very tricky to do and I wish there was more research on this.

In my opinion, what we need is:

1) A client-side performant SQLite database that supports live queries. I.e. you can automatically re-render the page when the queries change. That way your database can drive the UI and be the source of truth in regards to what's displayed on the screen.

2) A separate realtime syncing protocol that syncs database state to client state.

And ideally this is all open source, and that these two endeavors are not coupled tightly.

[1] Wa-sqlite is the best (imo) client-side db - better than than the official Sqlite WASM build (for now) because it had a indexeddb fallback for browsers that aren't the cutting edge Chrome.

[2] cr-sqlite is an interesting project using CRDTs to sync state around. However I still believe that for many production use-cases you want a ultimate server source of truth.

[3] Replicache is still the best closed source solution I know of.

[1] - https://github.com/rhashimoto/wa-sqlite

[2] https://github.com/rhashimoto/wa-sqlite/discussions/63

> I wonder what the ecosystem would look like if things were otherwise.

Shameless plug - I'm building https://github.com/AlexErrant/Pentive which is basically GitHub/Reddit for flashcards. Very much pre-product and a WIP, though the offline client proof of concept is done.

I also enjoyed the Treesitter talk from 5 years ago by Max Brunsfeld https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Jes3bD6P0To

I'm currently building a query language whose grammar is very much inspired by Github's search syntax. I'm using Lezer, which is a GLR like Treesitter, so this talk learned me some parser generators (I've no formal CS education). Here's my grammar, a playground, and an example search query if anyone wants to play with it

https://github.com/AlexErrant/Pentive/blob/main/app/src/quer...

https://littletools.app/lezer

    -(a) spider-man -a b -c -"(quote\\"d) str" OR "l o l" OR  a b c ((a "c") b) tag:what -deck:"x y"

Not really. There are options for sharing cards on Anki https://www.reddit.com/r/Anki/comments/14j2jfy/deck_sharing_... but their collaboration features are limited.

I myself am building an Anki clone https://github.com/AlexErrant/Pentive with collaboration built in as a first class citizen, though its far from primetime. Currently stewing on how to get the SR algorithm, FSRS, to compile to wasm.

https://github.com/AlexErrant/Pentive

A free, open source, local-first, spaced repetition system that works offline, has p2p syncing, plugins, and first class support for collaboration. It's GitHub/Reddit for flashcards.

I basically took Anki and turned it into a webapp >_>

I find Solid's model pretty damn close to "compiling down to nothing". I chose Solid for my project because I wanted to support plugins that used other UI frameworks. I recently got a Svelte plugin working with the SolidJS router. I could probably make it prettier... but it's literally a call to Solid's `createComponent` with the Router and an anchoring div to which the Svelte component is mounted. Ezpz.

https://github.com/AlexErrant/Pentive/blob/main/example-plug...

I'm also building an Anki clone (sigh) that I'm calling "Github for flashcards".

>A free, open source, local-first, spaced repetition system that works offline, has p2p syncing, plugins, and first class support for collaboration.

https://github.com/AlexErrant/Pentive

Very much a WIP, completely unusable, but I recently made a video demoing the technical proof of concept.

Anki, imo, already has an open algorithm (that the user can change via plugins), universal interfaces, and is "self-hosted". My eyes perked up at REST api, but it doesn't look like there's a centralized server that hosts shared cards, which is where my mind went.

I'm building https://github.com/AlexErrant/Pentive/ which is basically Anki + Reddit - people can optionally upload their cards for others to download, and the most popular cards rise to the top. It's FLOSS, offline-first, supports plugins and p2p syncing, and is very much a WIP. My proof of concept is almost done though, which demos the critical technologies in a secure way.

I'm using cr-sqlite right now in my Anki clone: https://github.com/AlexErrant/Pentive

It's basically an offline-first flashcard webapp. CR-Sqlite allows for incremental syncing.

With Anki (the app from which I'm taking my inspiration), syncing is _not_ incremental - basically it just copies SQLite files around. So for example, the app could be on an iPhone with cards a card `A` reviewed, but the app on an iPad could make changes to the template on which card `A` is based, and that's enough to cause a conflict - you must take changes from only the iPad or only the iPhone. (To be clear - Anki does have some incremental syncing capabilities - I'm picking an intentionally pathological example.) CR-SQLite will mean that everything is incremental, however.

Basically makes 3 way merges a breeze (or n-way merges, really).

A FLOSS, offline-first, spaced repetition system that has first class support for collaboration, curation, and plugins. It's Reddit for flashcards.

https://github.com/AlexErrant/Pentive

I've been thinking about this for a stupid amount of time... thinking that someday someone's going to improve on Anki. Finally got tired of it and said that person's me.