Company
Date Published
Author
Dave MacLeod
Word count
7002
Language
English
Hacker News points
None

Summary

EdgeDB's integration with Rust over the past five years highlights a shared commitment to strong typing and expressiveness, enhancing the development of correct and maintainable code by shifting the burden from the developer to the language itself. This synergy is exemplified by EdgeDB's transition of its CLI and parser to Rust, reflecting a mutual emphasis on type safety and compiler assistance in both technologies. EdgeDB's design, akin to Rust's leveraging of LLVM, utilizes PostgreSQL as a backend to reduce implementation complexity and benefit from existing optimizations. Additionally, EdgeDB's handling of migrations resonates with Rust's refactoring approach, ensuring that changes are applied only when type safety and constraints are satisfied, which parallels Rust's "if it compiles, it works" philosophy. Both EdgeDB and Rust emphasize zero-cost abstractions and aim to minimize runtime errors by making compile-time checks robust and informative. EdgeDB's query language, EdgeQL, allows for expressive and efficient data retrieval akin to Rust's iterator methods, ensuring performance without sacrificing clarity. Through its strong typing, absence of NULL, and structured data operations, EdgeDB presents itself as a compelling choice for developers familiar with Rust, offering a database experience that aligns with the language's principles of safety and performance.