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by andkon 1654 days ago
Don’t forget to count all the cruise missiles, too!
1 comments

Those tend to fall out of the “active use” category not long after entering it, so it’s probably not a big factor.

On a more serious note, had there been something special about SQLite supporting military use of their project that prompted this? Otherwise that’s the point of free software, people are free to do (mostly) whatever they want with it. Including building weapons. SQLite is so prevalent, it’s almost like pointing out you have to include cruise missiles in the count of active x86 chips, or $insert_bad_guy as an active user of roads and electricity.

I'm sure it was picked a long time ago and it's too costly to switch. I imagine any code going into multi-million dollar missile needs to be incredibly audited and understood.

(Not that this never happens! https://www.simscale.com/blog/2017/12/nasa-mars-climate-orbi...)

I was just making a funny joke about how it was developed originally for cruise missiles. Though it turns out I was misremembering: it was made for guided missile destroyers. And it makes sense! What a great use case. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SQLite#History
> Those tend to fall out of the “active use”

At least you don't have to write garbage collection code for those. It just crashes.

I remember an interview whereby he mentioned sqlite was initially built for software on warships.