The Big Fork: libSQL with Glauber Costa

Glauber Costa (@glcst) is the founder of Turso and the co-creator of libSQL, an open source, open contribution fork of the database engine library, SQLite. Most people believe that SQLite is open-source software, but it actually exists in the public domain and doesn’t accept external contributions. With their big fork, Glauber and his team have set out to evolve SQLite into a modern database with support for distributed data, an asynchronous interface, compatibility with WASM and Linux, and more.

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In this episode we discuss:

• Community reactions to forking SQLite

• How Glauber was spoiled by starting his career developing for Linux

• The controversial decision to launch libSQL without writing a single line of code

• The plan for incorporating upstream changes from SQLite

• Examples of how application developers need to move code “to the edge”

Links:

• libSQL

• SQLite

• Turso

• LiteFS

• Litestream

• rqlite

• VLCN

People mentioned:

• Avi Kivity (@AviKivity)

• Dor Laor (@DorLaor)

• Ben Johnson (@benbjohnson)

• Phillip O’Toole (@general_order24)

• Matt Tantaman (@tantaman)

Other episodes:

• Scylla with Dor Laor 

• Apache Cassandra with Patrick McFadin