[samwillis]

Hey everyone, I work on PGlite. Excited to see this on HN again.

If you have any questions I'll be sure to answer them.

We recently crossed a massive usage milestone with over 3M weekly downloads (we're nearly at 4M!) - see https://www.npmjs.com/package/@electric-sql/pglite

While we originally built this for embedding into web apps, we have seen enormous growth in devtools and developer environments - both Google Firebase and Prisma have embedded PGlite into their CLIs to emulate their server products.

[mpweiher]

This looks really interesting...but why WASM-only? Naively it seems like WASM-ification would be a 2nd step, after lib-ification.

Obviously missing something...

[OvbiousError]

If I understand correctly, what this project does is take the actual postgresql sources, which are written in C, compile them to wasm and provide typescript wrappers. So you need the wasm to be able to use the C code from js/ts.

[intrasight]

WASM means you only need to develop for one target run time. That's my guess as to why.

[saurik]

Yeah... I was super excited by this project when it was first announced--and would even use it from Wasm--but since it ONLY works in Wasm, that seemed way too niche.

[SteveLauC]

Hi there, would you like to share the progress of converting PGlite into a native system library? I can see there is a repo for that, but it hasn't been updated for 5 months

[tdrz]

We are actively looking into it. But as you can see from the comments here, there are quite a lot of other features that users want and we have limited bandwidth. We will do it!

[nnnnico]

This is awesome, thanks for your work! Could this work with the file system api in the bowser to write to user disk instead of indexeddb? I'm interested in easy ways for syncing fot local-first single user stuff <3 thanks again

[tdrz]

That's a very nice idea, we will look into it!

[DonnyV]

I see you guys are working on supporting the postgis extension. This would be HUGE!!! The gis community would be all over this.

If anyone wants to help out who has compiled the postgis extension and is familiar with WASM. You can help out here. https://github.com/electric-sql/pglite/pull/807

[JackC]

Thanks for your work!

Is the project interested in supporting http-vfs readonly usecases? I'm thinking of tools like DuckDB or sql.js-httpvfs that support reading blocks from a remote url via range requests.

Curious because we build stuff like this https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45774571 at my lab, and the current ecosystem for http-vfs is very slim — a lot of proofs of concept, not many widely used and optimized libraries.

I have no idea if this makes sense for postgres — are the disk access patterns better or worse for http-vfs in postgres than they are in sqlite?

[phplovesong]

This looks REALLY awesome. Could you name a few usecases when i would want to use this. Is the goal to be an sqlite/duckdb alternative?

[sgt]

Any chance for a Flutter library?

[oulipo2]

I'm interested to use Pglite for local unit-testing, but I'm using timescaledb in prod, do you think you will have this extension pre-built for Pglite?

[tdrz]

We have a walk-through on porting extensions to PGlite: https://pglite.dev/extensions/development#building-postgres-...

[samwillis]

I'm not aware of anything trying to compile timescale for it. Some extensions are easer than other, if there is limited (or ideally no) network IO and its written in C (Timescale is!) with minimal dependencies then its a little easer to get them working.

[rel]

I’ve had incredible success with testcontainers for local unit-testing

[glenjamin]

Does pglite in memory outperform “normal” postgres?

If so then supporting the network protocol so it could be run in CI for non-JS languages could be really cool

[jitl]

Look into libeatmydata LD_PRELOAD. it disables fsync and other durability syscalls, fabulous for ci. Materialize.com uses it for their ci that’s where i learned about it.

[allan_s]

for CI you can already use postgresql with "eat-my-data" library ? I don't know if there's more official image , but in my company we're using https://github.com/allan-simon/postgres-eatmydata

[mentalgear]

Yupp, this has big potential for local-first !

[dcgudeman]

Small world! We spoke about this at the QCon dinner.

[TheDataMaverick]

Amazing work! It makes setting up CI so much easier.

[lame_lexem]

huh. could you tell how you use it in ci?

[reachableceo]

Well downloads doesn’t equal usage does it ?

How do you know how many deployments you actually have in the wild?

[pixelatedindex]

True downloads don’t equal usage but there’s a correlation. I also doubt deployment equals usage - I can deploy to some env and not make any requests.

Additionally, how you can get data on how many deployments without telemetry? The only telemetry that I’m interested in is for my uses, and don’t really care about sending data on deployment count to a third party. So the download count becomes a “good enough” metric.