Tip ten Brink

Fork your dependencies, trim them to only your use case, never update unless it breaks for your users. I’ve been vocal about this for 10+ years. I’ve always said that updating is way riskier than latent bugs (which can be tracked and CVEs monitored). If you are updating a dependency, it’s on you to analyze every single commit in the full transitive set of dependencies. If you dont see anything compelling, dont update! I remember at HashiCorp once in awhile an engineer would try to update a dep or replace a DIY lib with an external one and id always ask “show me the commit we need.” Dont update for the sake of it. Feeling pretty swell about this mentality with all the supply chain attacks happening.

Bun rewrote itself from Zig to Rust. AI did most of the work. 98% of the test suite passed on the first run. The question isn't hypothetical anymore. Should we rewrite Node.js in Rust?

Read Kyle Kingsbury’s 32 page critique of AI: “The Future of Everything is Lies.” It is a polemic, cynical and disagreeable piece to many in tech, but felt by most outside of it. It highlights the many problems we will need to solve as AI percolates through society. Must read.

Here is one thing that sucks in Rust and where Zig shines: memory allocation. Let me explain: we take memory allocation for granted, and the language APIs make it look infallible, but it isn’t. Take this: let mut v = Vec::new(); v.push(my_data); The push could fail if the system could not allocate the required memory. In Rust, this straight up aborts/panics. You cannot handle this as an error. Second, you cannot control how memory is allocated, like on the heap, arena, or your custom allocator. All data structures use one global allocator. The current Rust APIs suck. Rust does have an allocator API, but it has been in nightly for many years. Like in the above example, it becomes try_push. Whereas, all of this is first class in Zig. Every collection takes an allocator, and you can pass around the one you want. They return errors which you can handle. In a database, you want to control every aspect of memory. If there is no more free space left to allocate, we want that to become a normal error that can be returned to the caller and handled gracefully. If the database aborts/panics because an allocation failed, that is terrible - one query or one bad allocation path can take down the entire process and affect all connected clients. In Turso, we use a global allocator, and now we are working towards changing that (PR in next tweet). However, we need to add so much boilerplate code, redefine all data structures, and replace existing usage everywhere. It just sucks. This would be so sweet in Zig. A great example is TigerBeetle's codebase.

This is the guy that's calling GRRM's prose "tacky" btw 😹

Metrics are now GA. Most metrics systems charge you for visibility. More labels → more cost. So teams pre-aggregate, drop dimensions, and decide what to throw away before they know what they'll need. That's the metrics tax. Today it ends.