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by enricozb 162 days ago
The final comments in this text seem sobering and indicate an openness to change. I worked recently on a project to migrate RediSearch to Rust, and this was partially motivated by a decent number of recent CVEs. If SQLite doesn't have this problem, then there needs to be some other strong argument for moving to Rust.

I also think it's important to have really solid understandings (which can take a few decades I imagine) to understand the bounds of what Rust is good at. For example, I personally think it's unclear how good Rust can be for GUI applications.

2 comments

It's nice that they don't dismiss out-of-hand the idea of using a language other than C (the conclusion is far less dogmatic than the editorialized title here suggests (the actual title of the page being "Why Is SQLite Coded In C?")). But let's be clear that the stability and "boringness" that C currently enjoys took literal decades to realize (pre-ANSI C was a wild-west shitshow that makes pre-ECMA Javascript look tame by comparison), and giving the same leeway to other languages probably doesn't suggest using e.g. Rust until at least 2040 or so.
Something like Ada/SPARK might be a better choice for something like SQLite as well.