That’s not my requirement, that’s SQLite’s requirement. If you want to dispute their claim, I recommend you write to them, however I strongly suspect they know more about this than you do.
I know it's on the sqlite side. I'm familiar with the claim and disagree with it.
Re:Building SQLite with a small swarm
by scott_w on Wednesday February 18, 2026 @03:02AM
(#47058474)
You’re arguing in this context:
> wouldn't the ability to automatically rewrite sqlite in Rust be a valuable asset?
If you want to rewrite SQLite, you must accept their position. Otherwise you simply aren’t rewriting SQLite, you’re writing your own database.
Not having bound checks does not make sqlite sqlite. If that was the case, you couldn't compile it with https://clang.llvm.org/docs/BoundsSafety.html turned on and still call it sqlite for example.
- counting foo().except() as 2 branches
- counting a simple loop as a missed branch, because it got unrolled and you didn't test it with 7,6,5,4,3,2,1 items
- failing on unused straight implementation of memcpy because your CPU supports SIMD and chose that alternative
Etc. The compiled version will be full of code you'll never run regardless of language.