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2ndorderthoughttoday at 11:40 AM2 repliesview on HN

Can anyone explain why it is a good idea to make a graphdb in typescript? This not a language flamewar question, more of an implementation details question.

Though typescript is pretty fast, and the language is flexible, we all know how demanding graph databases are. How hard they are to shard, etc. It seems like this could be a performance trap. Are there successful rbdms or nosql databases out there written in typescript?

Also why is everything about LLMs now? Can't we discuss technologies for their face value anymore. It's getting kind of old to me personally.


Replies

phpnodetoday at 11:48 AM

I needed it to be possible to run the graph in the browser and cloudflare workers, so TS was a natural fit here. It was built as an experiment into end to end type safety - nothing to do with LLMs, but it ended up being useful in the product I'm building. It's not designed for large data sets.

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voodooEntitytoday at 1:09 PM

I kinda feel ya.

I wrote my own in-Memory Graph (i'd rather call it storage than a DB) some years ago in golang, even there i was wondering if golang actually is the optimal technology for something like a database especially due to the garbage collection/stop the world/etc. Its just there are certain levels of optimization i will never be able to properly reach (lets ignore possible hacks). Looking at a solution in typescript, no matter how "nice" it looks, this just doesnt seem to be the correct "tool/technology" for the target.

And inb4, there are use cases for everything, and same as i wouldn't write a website in C, i also wouldn't write a database in javascript/typescript.

I just would argue this is the wrong pick.

@llms : im not even getting into this because if you dont wanne read "llm" you basically can't read 99% of news nowadays. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯

edit: im a big fan of graph databases so im happy about every public attention they get ^