Nolan Lawson

The thing is, I can't/don't disagree with you, in terms of arguing for SQLite over alternatives. Hearing the practical specifics of your edge case is (depressingly) insightful.

I just realized the links I posted didn't include the article I had in mind when I went link-digging (and didn't properly check the results, woops). I found it: https://nolanlawson.com/2014/04/26/web-sql-database-in-memoriam/

Potentially interestingly, I re-found the link above via hn.algola.com, which also found me the comments (for the only time the above link was posted), at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7661236. The top comment thread there points to https://github.com/kripken/sql.js, which was started pre-WebAssembly but now builds for WASM, and the network tab in devtools is telling me it's a 497KB download. It says it takes the position of providing a first-class JavaScript API instead of C bindings, and that you have to implement your own save/load<->import/export layer. You may have already discovered and discarded this possibility.

FWIW, if using SQLite does stick, I reckon that an article (even a small one) about the journey/decision process/implementation gotchas/etc - and particularly details about the use cases, and why SQLite shines for your scenario - would probably be received very positively.

Thanks for replying! (My fast response time was due to fun timing: I literally just opened my laptop this morning, checked HN, and saw your comment posted "0 minutes ago" :D)

Well it's kind of a long story.

The short version is that Apple overly focused on monetising their app store and doing everything conceivable they could get away with to push people towards it.

If you wanted to release an app for iOS users you needed to purchase Apple hardware, and a yearly subscription just to start developing an app. Then to release the app you had to follow Apple's rules which allowed them to take a 30% cut of all profits generated with your app. If Apple really liked your app, they could just make their own version and kick yours off the app store without recourse so they could keep the other 70% of the profits.

Meanwhile, users and developers could skirt around the app store by using Safari. This represented a direct threat to the largest revenue generating model that Apple had ever created. Apple needed to make sure that their ad campaign: "There's an app for that" always held true.

So Apple did what it could to indirectly reduce the effectiveness of Safari, keeping it behind what other browsers could do. They even made it impossible for other browsers to be installed on their devices by adding rules to the app store that mandated that all web apps had to be powered by Safari's web view. In essence, all "web browsers" on iOS are just reskins of Safari, warts and all.

Eventually this culminated in an article that basically became a lightning rod for developer's dealing with Apple's anti-competitive behaviour:…

Agree with the parent. Regarding yarn, it was created because npm started showing weaknesses in many things, with large and complex dependency trees: install was slow, sometimes unreliable and not cross-platform portable, and the codebase was difficult to refactor due to legacy code and backward compatibility, so it made more sense to create a new package manager without that burden and try to iteratively align with npm to become a drop-in replacement.

It's easy to fall into the fatigue due to new languages, tools etc. coming out each week but please think twice before posting dismissive comments like that.

I observe a lot of "I don't read HN anymore" sentiment lately among top tech Twitter users, partially due to that.

There's a lot of awesome stuff being given out for free and people are whining. (Yes, I'm a bit tired of constantly following and evaluating things, but I keep it for myself.)

The situation came to the point where some guys are thinking about not opensourcing their tools anymore due to constant criticism and maintenance fatigue. Read the two links below (accidentally, the first one is from yarn co-author!):

https://twitter.com/sebmck/status/879282797915119616

https://nolanlawson.com/2017/03/05/what-it-feels-like-to-be-an-open-source-maintainer/

In addition to Wil Wheaton's experience linked above, we have:

https://nolanlawson.com/2018/08/31/mastodon-and-the-challenges-of-abuse-in-a-federated-system/

https://hackernoon.com/mastodon-is-dead-in-the-water-888c10e8abb1 [1]

https://www.theverge.com/2019/7/12/20691957/mastodon-decentralized-social-network-gab-migration-fediverse-app-blocking [2]

[1] See section on identity and moderation - you can't decouple them when you have a hybrid between a content platform and a social media application (Which is what any video hosting service that allows comments, or shows recommended videos, or cross-links to other distributed aggregators is.)

[2] Bad[3] people show up to the community, everyone loses their mind, hard-coded bans starts happening, because the community interfaces with things like app stores, and app stores have policies that don't care one whit about your federated free-as-in-speech ideals, not to mention that developers and moderators are human beings too, and maybe they personally can't stand allowing furries/commies/fascists/homosexuals/homophobes/Englishmen in their space.

[3] For whatever someone's definition of 'bad' is.

From a blog post last month by the same author:

> Today, I would say that about 90% of my code is authored by Claude Code. The rest of the time, I’m mostly touching up its work or doing routine tasks that it’s slow at, like refactoring or renaming.

> I see a lot of my fellow developers burying their heads in the sand, refusing to acknowledge the truth in front of their eyes, and it breaks my heart because a lot of us are scared, confused, or uncertain, and not enough of us are talking honestly about it. Maybe it’s because the initial tribal battle lines have clouded everybody’s judgment, or maybe it’s because we inhabit different worlds where the technology is either better or worse (I still don’t think LLMs are great at UI for example), but there’s just a lot of patently unhelpful discourse out there, and I’m tired of it.

https://nolanlawson.com/2026/01/24/ai-tribalism/

If you're responding to this with angry anti-AI rants (or wild AI hype), might want to go read that post.

I think I'm more cynical about the process than you are. From my point of view, the process has been intensely political from day one, with rules honoured mainly in the breach.

The best retelling of events, I think, is this one: http://nolanlawson.com/2014/04/26/web-sql-database-in-memoriam/

Has some very good details. And it's certainly funny to see what was said during the discussion with how things turned out in practice.

Edit: I'd sum it up as "Google and Apple argue for a solution that will work on mobile; Mozilla and Oracle don't care about mobile, are weirdly obsessed with the idea that developers hate SQL, and use political manoeuvring to win the fight". (Oracle's role in this seems especially odd, but perhaps they had some longer term strategy in mind.) In any case, in retrospect ignoring mobile was a bad idea, and ditching SQL seems to have had no real benefit.