[ripley12]

As I understand it (heard second-hand from someone in the know), the CockroachDB people regret that language choice and that’s why Materialize (which employs a bunch of ex-Cockroach people) uses Rust.

I generally think a garbage collector makes sense for 99% of programs out there, but databases often need a bit more control over memory management for performance reasons.

[jordanlewis]

I've worked on CockroachDB for almost 7 years as both an engineer and in management. We do not regret writing the database in Go, in my opinion there is no way we would have been nearly as productive if we wrote the entire thing in Rust.

There are many parts to a distributed database, and there is surprisingly more business logic than you might expect. The business logic is mostly what I am talking about - being able to develop quickly in Go for these less performance sensitive parts is a huge boon.

For performance sensitive parts I think there's an argument that we could have been happier in a language like Rust, for example a dual process model like TiDB's. But I think it's ambiguous: a more complex architecture like that one comes with huge tradeoffs.

tl;dr there's much more to database development than performance at all costs, and it's false that the team regrets using Go, please don't spread that rumor :)