[eatonphil]

> But how does it determine when it should write to disk?

You write fixed sized number of key-value pairs to the file at a time. This is how LSM trees work, you chunk your data up into N sorted keys per chunk. I don't myself understand all the specifics but this is the gist.

> Does every write to a potentially OOM operation get preceeded by a check?

If you allocate memory upfront and don't allocate any more memory, you can't OOM after the initial allocation. That's what TigerBeetle does.

Zig has some nice standard library containers for adding items while asserting that there's capacity. If we miscalculate, it is caught during tests because assertions fail.