> How can you store program state on disk like that? You'd need serialization and deserialization.

You need serialization and deserialization when interacting with a DB, too. You're trusting a library to do most of that for you. This is the difference between a junior engineer and a senior engineer. As a junior engineer, you don't trust your own judgement and use a library. As a senior engineer, you don't trust the library writer's judgement, so you write it yourself.

> As a junior engineer, you don't trust your own judgement and use a library. As a senior engineer, you don't trust the library writer's judgement, so you write it yourself.

What? No. As a senior engineer you realize that loading data from a database is a solved problem, has nothing to do with the core use cases you're addressing, and would be a massive waste of time to build yourself.

Dunning-Kruger begs to differ...

* * *

You have things like rocksdb, SQLite etc that are simple have serialization-deserialization built-in, so no external app dependencies

Maybe a bunch of JSON files on the local file system? Find the files and read the contents as needed.

My first thought was the way early 1990s forum and blog scripts did it, aka the UBB/Movable Type method of storing everything as static text files in a directory somewhere.

That would be really inefficient though. I vaguely recall database driven blog and forum scripts taking over because of how poorly the old solution worked at scale.