Best language for database kernel development?

This page summarizes the projects mentioned and recommended in the original post on news.ycombinator.com

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  • tidb

    TiDB is an open-source, cloud-native, distributed, MySQL-Compatible database for elastic scale and real-time analytics. Try AI-powered Chat2Query free at : https://tidbcloud.com/free-trial

    One of the founder of TiDB/TiKV here from [PingCAP](https://pingcap.com)

    I have been thinking about this problem with my peers when I started to build [TiDB](https://github.com/pingcap/tidb) seven years ago. At that time, nearly all of us were familiar with Go language, so we decided to use Go to build the SQL layer of TiDB. Thanks to Go, we could develop TiDB very quickly and released the first MVP in half a year. I remembered clearly the sense when we ran TPC-C successfully, although the TPMC was just 1 at that time, this was a good start for us.

    But Go had some problems, e.g. the GC was not good before, the fair scheduling might cause some latency problem, or data racing may happen sometimes. So when we decided to build a distributed storage (aha, [TiKV](https://githbu.com/tikv/tikv), we wanted use another language to guarantee safety. I really admire our courage - we chose Rust which was just released 1.0 and missed lots of libraries at that time. Now it seems that this is an awesome choice, TiKV has been graduated from CNCF, and been used as building block not only for TiDB, but also for other distributed systems. Thanks Rust.

    When TiDB started being used in many companies, we found that our customer not only ran lots of online transactions in TiDB, but also they wanted to ran some realtime analytic queries directly because the data has been in TiDB already. So we decided to build a HTAP database, to introduce a column storage beside TiKV, this is [TiFlash](https://github.com/pingcap/tiflash). We build TiFlash based on Clickhouse, so of course, we use C++.

    As you can see, to build only one integrated database - TiDB, we at least use three languages, every language has its own reason to be introduced. We can treat the distributed database as a service system, each service can be built with your favorite language and the services are linked by gRPC like TiDB does now. You may doubt that - “hey, guys, you are building a database, performance is very importance”. Yes, this is true, but we also build a complex distributed system, especially on the cloud. Scale-out, elastic, user experience must be important too. This is trade off for an engineer :-)

  • tiflash

    The analytical engine for TiDB and TiDB Cloud. Try free: https://tidbcloud.com/free-trial

    One of the founder of TiDB/TiKV here from [PingCAP](https://pingcap.com)

    I have been thinking about this problem with my peers when I started to build [TiDB](https://github.com/pingcap/tidb) seven years ago. At that time, nearly all of us were familiar with Go language, so we decided to use Go to build the SQL layer of TiDB. Thanks to Go, we could develop TiDB very quickly and released the first MVP in half a year. I remembered clearly the sense when we ran TPC-C successfully, although the TPMC was just 1 at that time, this was a good start for us.

    But Go had some problems, e.g. the GC was not good before, the fair scheduling might cause some latency problem, or data racing may happen sometimes. So when we decided to build a distributed storage (aha, [TiKV](https://githbu.com/tikv/tikv), we wanted use another language to guarantee safety. I really admire our courage - we chose Rust which was just released 1.0 and missed lots of libraries at that time. Now it seems that this is an awesome choice, TiKV has been graduated from CNCF, and been used as building block not only for TiDB, but also for other distributed systems. Thanks Rust.

    When TiDB started being used in many companies, we found that our customer not only ran lots of online transactions in TiDB, but also they wanted to ran some realtime analytic queries directly because the data has been in TiDB already. So we decided to build a HTAP database, to introduce a column storage beside TiKV, this is [TiFlash](https://github.com/pingcap/tiflash). We build TiFlash based on Clickhouse, so of course, we use C++.

    As you can see, to build only one integrated database - TiDB, we at least use three languages, every language has its own reason to be introduced. We can treat the distributed database as a service system, each service can be built with your favorite language and the services are linked by gRPC like TiDB does now. You may doubt that - “hey, guys, you are building a database, performance is very importance”. Yes, this is true, but we also build a complex distributed system, especially on the cloud. Scale-out, elastic, user experience must be important too. This is trade off for an engineer :-)

  • InfluxDB

    Collect and Analyze Billions of Data Points in Real Time. Manage all types of time series data in a single, purpose-built database. Run at any scale in any environment in the cloud, on-premises, or at the edge.

NOTE: The number of mentions on this list indicates mentions on common posts plus user suggested alternatives. Hence, a higher number means a more popular project.

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