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Comment by diffxx | Hacker News Reader

Fair points, although the bus factor is more like 3 or 4 for SQLite as far as I know. The question though is that if the entire team vanished from the face of the earth, what would the impact be? My guess is that either SQLite would be good enough as is for 99% of use cases and it wouldn't need much development apart from maybe some minor platform specific use cases or, if new functionality truly is needed, then it would be better for a new team to rewrite a similar program from scratch using SQLite as more of a POC than as a blueprint.

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SQLite is supported until 2050, and will likely outlast many other platforms if this goal is attained.

I hope the bus factor is high enough to reach the goal.

"Every machine-code branch instruction is tested in both directions. Multiple times. On multiple platforms and with multiple compilers. This helps make the code robust for future migrations. The intense testing also means that new developers can make experimental enhancements to SQLite and, assuming legacy tests all pass, be reasonably sure that the enhancement does not break legacy."

https://www.sqlite.org/lts.html

I was speaking less to the SQLite situation specifically and more to the general idea of "Could it be that this is precisely because they don't use "modern tools" and accept outside contributions?" and how I think teams that are very small and not very accepting of outside help/influence might affect that.

To that end I purposefully compares extremes, and tried to allude to the fact that most situations fall between those extremes in some way. SQLite is more towards one end than the other, but it's obviously not a single developer releasing binaries to the world, which is about as far to that extreme as you can go. The other end would probably be something like Debian.

That's not to say either of those situations have to be horrible at what the other excels at. That singular person could have set things in place such that all their code and the history of it gets released on their death, and Debian obviously has a working process for releasing a high quality distribution.

AFAIUI the company behind SQLite (Hipp & co.) have basically endless funding. Not unlimited, just a good enough budget and not likely to end soon. That's also a big factor.

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