Writing a SQLite clone from scratch in C

Re:Writing a SQLite clone from scratch in C by longlongago on Monday September 04, 2017 @03:32PM (#15170350)

Part of the reason is support. Long ago Britton Lee[1] in fact provided an AST API mainly for tool vendors. They stopped doing that when one of their customers called them asking for help with the "GUIDE BY" clause. Nobody at BL knew what a "GUIDE BY" was since it was something implemented by the frontend, but that didn't matter to the customer.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Britton_Lee%2C_Inc.

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Re:Writing a SQLite clone from scratch in C by morgo on Monday September 04, 2017 @04:13PM (#15170579)

Product Manager for MySQL here. Yes, I agree with you that the reason is most likely support.

Consider SQL; it's declarative and highly expressive. Your users can craft queries that you did not consider, and you have to make sure they work consistently between versions. It's a very hard problem.

Creating more public APIs? It's a hard sell that vendors are sensitive to. Reducing the surface area makes it easier to add future improvements.

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