As someone who uses sqlite fairly regularly, but doesn't understand what most of those paragraphs mean, do you have any recommendations for learning resources?
I'm gathering that I need to learn about:
- WAL
- Shared Memory APIs
- Concurrency models
- Durable Objects?
WAL: Write ahead log, common strategy for DBs (sqlite, postgres, etc.) to improve commit performance. Instead of fsync()ing every change, you just fsync() a log file that contains all the changes and then you can fsync() the actual changes at your leisure
Shared memory API: If you want to share (mutable) data between multiple processes, you need some kind of procedure in place to manage that. How do you get a reference to the data to multiple processes, how do you make sure they don't trample each other's writes, etc.
Concurrency model: There are many different ways you can formalize concurrent processes and the way they interact (message passing, locking, memory ordering semantics, etc.). Different platforms will expose different concurrency primitives that may not work the same way as other platforms and may require different reasoning or code structure
Durable objects - I think this is some Cloudflare service where they host data that can be read or modified by your users
This is all from memory, but IME, GPT is pretty good for asking about concepts at this level of abstraction
And side note on your last point - I've been burned too many times by confident hallucinations to trust my foundational learning to GPT. I hope someday that will improve, but for now ChatGPT is as trustworthy as an evening chat with someone at the bar.
... Someone who has been drinking since happy hour.
If you'd like a trustworthy overview, the book Designing Data-Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppmann is a classic. I really hope we get an updated version, but the fundamentals all still hold anyway.
I'm gathering that I need to learn about: - WAL - Shared Memory APIs - Concurrency models - Durable Objects?