Frankensqlite a Rust reimplementation of SQLite with concurrent writers

[messe]

> 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]

I thought I read somewhere that their full test suite is not publicly available?

[gigatexal]

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]

Isn't that test suite private though?

[andersmurphy]

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]

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.

[measurablefunc]

It's fake. It doesn't exist. It never happened. The whole thing is an LLM hallucination. You can notice that it's all half implemented if you read the code: https://github.com/Taufiqkemall2/frankensqlite/blob/main/cra...

[siliconc0w]

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]

It doesn't read ambitious so much as naive.

[anon-3988]

Clean room implementation yea sure buddy

[vvern]

Why does clean room even matter given SQLite is in the public domain?

[zmmmmm]

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]

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]

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]

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]

Good luck enforcing that. "Glad" to hear that Gemini's excluded.

[sam_goody]

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]

Says on top it's called monster but then it speaks of frankensql. Confusing website imho for a nice project

[bigyabai]

While I don't think the website is particularly well-designed, "monster" can be used as an adjective.

[bpbp-mango]

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]

We need to ban this kind of AI slop yesterday.

[skppy]

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]

Was it vibe coded?

[kennethallen]

Extremely. Repo is littered with one-off Python scripts, among many other indicators.

[baq]

Nobody in their right mind would sponsor this project to be hand written.

[littlestymaar]

Of course it was.

[Jooror]

Is the implementation untouched by generative AI? Seems a bit ignorant/dishonest to claim “clean-room” in such a case

[messe]

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]

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]

Yeah, “rewrite in rust” strikes again, this time equipped with a AI slop generator.

[measurablefunc]

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]

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.