[darcs-users] Possibly a very simplistic solution

zooko at zooko.com zooko at zooko.com
Wed May 19 13:33:29 UTC 2004


On the Mnet project we recently replaced the last vestige of BerkeleyDB with
special-purpose code of our own making, after three years of using BerkeleyDB
for everything followed by two years of laboriously ripping it out of
everything.

There was much rejoicing among Mnet hackers!  We had bitterly complained for
many years about the mysterious bugs and unnecessary complications.  Most of
them were probably not bugs inside bsddb, but bugs in the way that we used it.
It has way too many knobs and modes of operation.

Anyway, Mnet didn't require the full range of bsddb features.  A simple
"serialize, write to file" mechanism, plus a couple of techniques to ease
recovery from failures was all that we needed, and our homegrown code is faster
and better than using bsddb for the same simple task.

Another data point is that the Greg Hudson from svn has mentioned that he
thinks it was a mistake to use BerkeleyDB:

http://web.mit.edu/ghudson/thoughts/undiagnosing

Regards,

Zooko





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