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Comment by uuyi | Hacker News Reader

I would love to see more stuff like that.

An application I have written recently for personal use is a double entry accounting system after GNUcash hosed itself and gave me a headache. This is based on Go and SQLite. The entire thing is one file (go embed rocks) and serves a simple http interface with a few JS functions like it is 2002 again. The back end is a proper relational model that is stored in one .db file. It is fully transactional with integrity checks. To run it you just start program and open a browser. To backup you just copy the .db file. You can run reports straight out of SQLite in a terminal if you want.

This whole concept could scale to tens of users fine for LOB applications and consume little memory or resources.

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>> This whole concept could scale to tens of users

I strongly suspect this approach scales to tens of thousands of users. Maybe 30-40k users would be my guess on a garden variety intel i5 desktop from the past 3 years or so.

I say this because that hardware (assuming NVMe storage) will do north of 100k connect + select per second (connect is super cheap in sqlite, you're just opening a local file), assuming 2-3 selects per page serve gets me to the 30-40k number. The http server side won't be the bottleneck unless there's some seriously intensive logic being run.

Interesting point. I may have to write a performance test suite for it now and test this.

sqlite really does very well with reads but not as much for locking writes. not saying it couldn't scale to many users but I think the other person is a bit optimistic on a double entry accounting app being only reads. I would imagine it could certainly easily serve a few hundred though if not a few thousand.

SQLite does really well for locking writes as well as soon as you activate the WAL.

Check out alpinejs or stimulusjs and combine it with htmx to get to a SPA like experience with very little additional complexity! Htmx let’s you serve partials over the wire instead of a page load so you can update the page incrementally and alpine and stimulus are both tools to add JS sprinkles like you’ve described in a way that is unobtrusive.

I appreciate the notion but my objective was to do the exact opposite of this and keep away from external dependencies and scripts where possible, apart from the solitary go-sqlite3.

The result is about 30K of source (including Go, CSS, HTML templates) which is less than minified alpinejs!

Adding dependencies is the opposite of simple.

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