Leveraging Rust in our high-performance Java database

• QuestDB

  312 14,658 9.7 Java

  QuestDB is an open source time-series database for fast ingest and SQL queries

  

  QuestDB engineer here:

  It's true that our non-idiomatic Java usage denies us some of the benefits typically associated with Java programming. Automatic memory management and the old "Write Once, Run Anywhere" paradigm are difficult to maintain due to our reliance on native libraries and manual memory management.

  I see two classes of reasons for choosing Java:

  1. Historical: The QuestDB codebase predates Rust. According to Wikipedia, the initial Rust release was in 2015. The oldest commit in the QuestDB repo is from 2014: https://github.com/questdb/questdb/commit/95b8095427c4e2c781... What were the options back in 2014? C++? Too complicated. C? Too low-level. Pretty much anything else? Either too slow or too exotic.

  2. Technical: Java, even without GC or WORA, still offers some advantage.

• SaaSHub

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  SaaSHub - Software Alternatives and Reviews. SaaSHub helps you find the best software and product alternatives

  

• rust-maven-plugin

  5 117 3.5 Java

  Build Rust Cargo crates within a Java Maven Project

  

  The rust-maven-plugin we wrote indeed also supports JNA for these simple use cases.

  https://github.com/questdb/rust-maven-plugin

  Compared with JNA, JNI is indeed more complex, but it's faster and has more features. It also solves the problem of calling Java from Rust.

• Graal

  165 20,453 10.0 Java

  GraalVM compiles Java applications into native executables that start instantly, scale fast, and use fewer compute resources 🚀

  

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