Post #1 — Why I'm Building a Database Engine in C#

[nockawa]

When I tell people I'm building an ACID database engine in C#, the first reaction is always the same: "But what about GC pauses?" This post is the steel-man — every reasonable argument against the choice, plus the reasons it works anyway.

The insight that holds the whole project together: memory layout matters more than the language. A cache miss on Zen 4 costs 61-73 ns. A CAS hitting L1 costs 1.4 ns. That's a 50:1 ratio. No amount of "zero-cost abstraction" beats a cache-friendly layout, and modern C# — unsafe, ref struct, pinned memory, hardware intrinsics, [StructLayout(Explicit)] — gives you everything you need to build one.

Read it: https://nockawa.github.io/blog/why-building-database-engine-in-csharp/

[hectorr-st]

That's nice !