18 comments

  • messe 3 hours ago
    > TCL test harness. C SQLite's test suite is driven by ~90,000+ lines of TCL scripts deeply intertwined with the C API. These cannot be meaningfully ported. Instead, FrankenSQLite uses native Rust #[test] modules, proptest for property-based testing, a conformance harness comparing SQL output against C SQLite golden files, and asupersync's lab reactor for deterministic concurrency tests.

    If you're not running against the SQLite test suite, then you haven't written a viable SQLite replacement.

    • manmal 2 hours ago
      I thought I read somewhere that their full test suite is not publicly available?
      • messe 2 hours ago
        The TH3 test suite is proprietary, but the TCL test suite that they refer to is public domain.

        I'm not sure where they get their 90k CLOC count though, that seems like it might be an LLM induced hallucination given the rest of the project. The public domain TCL test suite is ~27k CLOC, and the proprietary suite is 1055k CLOC.

    • gigatexal 1 hour ago
      This and this needs Jepsen testing.

      The value of SQLite is how robust it is and that’s because of the rigorous test suite.

    • littlestymaar 2 hours ago
      Isn't that test suite private though?
      • messe 2 hours ago
        The TH3 test suite is proprietary, but the TCL test suite that they refer to is public domain.

        I'm not sure where they get their 90k CLOC count though, that seems like it might be an LLM induced hallucination given the rest of the project. The public domain TCL test suite is ~27k CLOC, and the proprietary suite is 1055k CLOC.

        • littlestymaar 1 hour ago
          Thanks for the clarification, I appreciate it.

          > and the proprietary suite is 1055k CLOC.

          Why is the code size of the proprietary test suite even public though?

          • dzogchen 59 minutes ago
            You can buy access to it.

            Any serious SQLite re-implementation should buy it and test against it.

            • kelseyfrog 39 minutes ago
              The cost of TH3 is listed as "call".

              It's much more likely the issue is one of cost, not of seriousity.

  • andersmurphy 30 minutes ago
    Whats the obsession with concurrent writes?

    Single writer will outperform MVCC as long as you do dynamic batching (doesn't prevent logical transactions) and all you have to do is manage that writer at the application level.

    Concurrent writers just thrash your CPU cache. The difference between L1 and L3 can be 100x. So your single writer on a single core can outperform 10-100s of cores. Especially when you start considering contention.

    Here's sqlite doing 100k TPS and I'm not even messing with core affinity and it's going over FFi in a dynamic language.

    https://andersmurphy.com/2025/12/02/100000-tps-over-a-billio...

  • tekacs 3 hours ago
    It's worth scrolling down to the current implementation status part:

    https://github.com/Dicklesworthstone/frankensqlite#current-i...

    Although I will admit that even after reading it, I'm not exactly sure what the current implementation status is.

  • siliconc0w 2 hours ago
    If this wasn't ambitious enough, the author is also porting glibc to rust. As I understand it, all of it is agentic coded using custom harnesses.
    • messe 2 hours ago
      It doesn't read ambitious so much as naive.
      • nine_k 2 hours ago
        It entirely depends on how much the author reads the result of the agentic coding.
      • baq 2 hours ago
        It sounds scifi, but not naive anymore.
  • anon-3988 3 hours ago
    Clean room implementation yea sure buddy
    • vvern 3 hours ago
      Why does clean room even matter given SQLite is in the public domain?
      • kennethallen 3 hours ago
        And in every training corpus many times over.
    • cindyllm 3 hours ago
      [dead]
  • zmmmmm 1 hour ago
    This kind of slop spewing into Github feels like the modern equivalent of toxic plumes coming from smoke stacks.

    Utterly unmaintainable by any human, likely never to be completed or used, but now deposited into the atmosphere for future trained AI models and humans alike to stumble across and ingest, degrading the environment for everyone around it.

    • Rapzid 1 hour ago
      It's kinda like when the web first started taking off then there were WYSIWYGs. Everyone and their mom was creating static HTML websites.

      But nobody shows off static HTML sites on HN.

  • coppsilgold 1 hour ago
    The author seems obsessed with RaptorQ[1], this is not a good place for it.

    RS over GF256 is more than adequate. Or just plain LDPC.

    [1] <https://www.jeffreyemanuel.com/writing/raptorq>

  • burakemir 3 hours ago
    Looks mildly interesting, but what's up with the license?

    MIT plus a condition that designates OpenAI and Anthropic as restricted parties that are not permitted to use or else?

    • nxobject 2 hours ago
      Good luck enforcing that. "Glad" to hear that Gemini's excluded.
      • nubg 1 hour ago
        Where do you see issues enforcing license terms?
        • kelnos 37 minutes ago
          The fact that they've hosted it on GitHub means they've agreed to GitHub's terms, which allows them (via OpenAI) to train on the code.

          Also it's pretty hilarious to vibe-code a library that clones another library that someone has spent decades of work on, and then try to prohibit people from using that LLM output as training data for an LLM.

  • sam_goody 30 minutes ago
    There is a popular [excellent non vibe-coded] web server called FrankenPHP; A port of PHP to Go bundled with Caddy.

    Are there any other FrankenProjects out there that have had any success?

    Were we so impressed by the concept of the original Frankenstein?

    Is this a Freudian slip, that we are expecting these AI projects to turn on their creators?

  • tosti 3 hours ago
    Says on top it's called monster but then it speaks of frankensql. Confusing website imho for a nice project
    • bigyabai 3 hours ago
      While I don't think the website is particularly well-designed, "monster" can be used as an adjective.
      • littlestymaar 2 hours ago
        There's a limit to what Claude can do without a competent human helping …
  • bpbp-mango 3 hours ago
    I was looking at this repo the other day. Time travel queries look really useful.

    Impressive piece of work from the AIs here.

  • Jean-Papoulos 1 hour ago
    We need to ban this kind of AI slop yesterday.
  • skppy 1 hour ago
    Even though it looks like LLM slop, we are starting to see big projects being translated/refactored with LLMs. It reminds me of the 2023 AI video era. If the pattern follows, we will start to see way fewer errors until it is economically viable.
  • DeathArrow 3 hours ago
    Was it vibe coded?
    • kennethallen 3 hours ago
      Extremely. Repo is littered with one-off Python scripts, among many other indicators.
    • baq 2 hours ago
      Nobody in their right mind would sponsor this project to be hand written.
    • littlestymaar 2 hours ago
      Of course it was.
  • Jooror 3 hours ago
    Is the implementation untouched by generative AI? Seems a bit ignorant/dishonest to claim “clean-room” in such a case
    • messe 3 hours ago
      AGENTS.md and COMPREHENSIVE_SPEC_FOR_FRANKENSQLITE_V1_CODEX.md in the root folder, and ugly AI slop image on the home page and README.

      A better question is if the implementation was touched by anything other than generative AI.

  • DetroitThrow 3 hours ago
    Love the "race" demo on the site, but very curious about how you approached building this. Appreciated the markdown docs for the insight on the prompt, spec, etc
  • up2isomorphism 1 hour ago
    Yeah, “rewrite in rust” strikes again, this time equipped with a AI slop generator.
  • measurablefunc 2 hours ago
    If you can't tell this is LLM slop then I don't really know what to tell you. What gave it away for me was the RaptorQ nonsense & conformance w/ standard sqlite file format. If you actually read the code you'll notice all sorts of half complete implementations of whatever is promised in the marketing materials: https://github.com/Taufiqkemall2/frankensqlite/blob/main/cra...
    • baq 2 hours ago
      If you bothered to do any research at all you’d know the author as an extreme, frontier, avant-garde, eccentric LLM user and I say it as an LLM enthusiast.
      • measurablefunc 2 hours ago
        Thanks. Next time I'll do more research on what counts for LLM code artwork before commenting on an incomplete implementation w/ all sorts of logically inconsistent requirements. All I can really do at this point is humbly ask for your & their avant-garde forgiveness b/c I won't make the same mistake again & that's a real promise you can take to the crypto bank.
        • baq 1 hour ago
          Great! But note I haven’t said that you should be doing the research. This was more of a warning about today, but it also was a different kind of warning about the next 12-18 months once models catch up to what this guy wants to do with them.
          • measurablefunc 1 hour ago
            Thank you for your wisdom. I'll make a note & make sure to follow up on this later b/c you obviously know much more about the future than a humble plebeian like myself.