Re:Why Is SQLite Coded in C and not Rust
by manwe150 on Tuesday October 14, 2025 @09:28PM
(#45587067)
If it was as completely tested as claimed, then switching to rust would be trivial. All you need to do is pass the test suite and all bugs would be gone. I can think of other reasons not to jump to rust (it is a lot of code, sqlite already works well, and test coverage is very good but also incomplete, and rust only solves a few correctness problems)—just not because of claiming sqlite is already tested enough to be bug free of the kinds of issues that rust might actually prevent.
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Re:Why Is SQLite Coded in C and not Rust
by dathinab on Tuesday October 14, 2025 @09:57PM
(#45587236)
> to rust would be trivial.
no, you still need to rewrite, re-optimize, etc. everything
it would make it much easier to be fully compatible, sure, but that doesn't make it trivial
furthermore part of it's (mostly internal) design are strongly influenced by C specific dev-UX aspects, so you wouldn't write them the same, so test for them (instead of integration tests) may not apply
which in general also means that you most likely would break some special purpose/usual user which do have "brittle" (not guaranteed) assumptions about SQLite
if you have code which very little if at all changes and has no major issues, don't rewrite it
but most of the new "external" things written around SQLite, alternative VFS impl. etc. tend to be at most partially written in C