RethinkDB is switching over to Lisp

April Fools! We aren’t switching to Lisp (as much as we love the language). We couldn’t resist having a bit of fun.

Over the past few months we’ve had many architectural discussions about the future of database technology. It quickly became apparent to us that C++, the language we used to develop RethinkDB, is not sufficiently expressive to build the next-generation database product. We realized that in order to design the database system of the future, we need to use a programming language of the future as well.

We did a quick survey of programming languages and eventually narrowed down our choices to Erlang, Haskell, and Common Lisp. Two years ago, Damien Katz of CouchDB laid out the reasons why Erlang is a poor choice for database products. Many of his arguments resonated with us, and we made a wise decision not to repeat Damien’s mistakes. When we dropped Erlang from consideration, we were left with an impossible choice - Haskell vs. Lisp.

After many heated debates, I remembered a phrase drilled into to me by an ex- coworker I deeply respect. He always said: “Don’t guess. Measure.” We decided to take a measured approach and use data and logical reasoning instead of emotional arguments. Because of the immense expressive power of both programming languages, we could develop two prototypes in a matter of days, and measure the performance with our internal benchmarking toolkit. Mike rewrote RethinkDB in Haskell, and I rewrote it in Common Lisp. After running both prototypes through our standard benchmarks, it immediately became clear that the Lisp version easily beat the Haskell version by every metric we could fathom. And so, we settled on Common Lisp.

One of the major criticisms of RethinkDB has been the closed nature of the project. Fortunately, this is no longer a problem. The fact is, there are very few developers that understand Common Lisp, so we no longer need to worry about competing companies forking our source code. As we’re preparing to open source our Lisp code base, I’m happy to kick off the effort by listing the last few lines of the source code in this post:

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