Yeah, I think BDFL wants to use Zig. I understand that it is nice for Zig to feel more like C, and that can be fun. If the toolchain is so far away from being mature, how long will it take the database to be mature?
Since previous comment was edited. I would clarify that I don’t doubt the engineering capabilities, just the timeline. A from scratch database in _established_ toolchains take 5-10 years. The Zig toolchain also is going to be evolving in the same timeframe or longer. The codegen, linking, architecture specific bugs etc. Isn’t it double the effort to bring to bear in the market?
You're right! In the past, distributed databases written without Deterministic Simulation Testing (DST) would typically take around ~10 years (~5 years for the consensus protocol and ~5 years for the storage engine). And then not without bugs.
However, and we write about this also in the post, but TigerStyle and DST enabled us to ship TigerBeetle to production in 3.5 years, in less time, to a higher standard, and to be the first distributed database with an explicit storage fault model (Kyle Kingsbury added new storage fault injectors to Jepsen) solving Protocol-Aware Recovery.
I was on a team with a similar timeline with C++ (4 year). All the language and toolchain difficulties came after shipping. Meeting new customer needs meant shifting from greenfield to brownfield engineering. We were chasing down strange platform and provider behaviors. Adding features while maintaining performance and correctness, meant relying on knowledge of tools available in the broader community. Solutions for build issues came through a combination of in-house effort and industry partners with related experience. Having two stable compilers (gcc and clang) was super helpful.
Since previous comment was edited. I would clarify that I don’t doubt the engineering capabilities, just the timeline. A from scratch database in _established_ toolchains take 5-10 years. The Zig toolchain also is going to be evolving in the same timeframe or longer. The codegen, linking, architecture specific bugs etc. Isn’t it double the effort to bring to bear in the market?