Why I'm Building a Database Engine in C#

4/10/2026 at 5:07:36 PM

> JIT warmup is real. The first call to any method pays the compilation cost. In a database engine, the first transaction after startup shouldn’t be 100x slower than the steady state.

Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't it what aot was supposed to solve?

by benterix

4/10/2026 at 7:47:50 PM

In the section “Hardware-accelerated WAL checksums” he explains how the JIT compiles away the hardware support stuff depending on the exact capabilities of the system its on. With AOT you don’t get this - it’s way more coarse like x64 vs ARM

by nycdotnet

4/10/2026 at 6:40:14 PM

AOT is a little fussy in real-world usage particularly for things like reflection. You can probably force it to work but it may make your code much uglier.

Span<T> is more important for performance TBH JIT warmup isn't a huge issue for a long-running process

by landl0rd

4/10/2026 at 6:44:18 PM

    > ...but it may make your code much uglier

Flip side is that if you use more source generation, it may end up making the code more terse/"prettier" where it matters and avoid the reflection hit.

AI agents seem fairly good at generating source generators so there doesn't seem to be a reason to not use them.

by CharlieDigital

4/10/2026 at 7:15:31 PM

With UnsafeAccessor you can often avoid reflection.

by sebazzz

4/10/2026 at 7:31:35 PM

What's fussy about AOT and reflection?

by orphea

4/10/2026 at 8:24:38 PM

Only a subset of reflection is actually AoT safe, and you can run into issues like "the method you wanted to call wasn't statically referenced anywhere, so there is no compiled implementation of it".

by pjc50

4/10/2026 at 10:55:35 PM

That's due to trimming which can be also be enabled for self-contained builds that use JIT compilation. Trimming is mandatory for AOT though. But you can use annotations to prevent trimming of specific thing.

AOT doesn't support generating new executable code at runtime (Reflection.Emit), like you can do in JIT mode.

by zigzag312

4/10/2026 at 8:30:48 PM

Eh, I don't see that as a huge deal because the first thing the DB has to do is warm up the disk cache, at least for the indexes. Of course the first call is slow.

by pjc50

4/10/2026 at 4:46:37 PM

Also worth mentioning are VeloxDB and RavenDB, both written in C#. TBF, I haven't used any of them... but aware they exist.

C# is pretty powerful and capable of lower level usage, such as in the examples given... not to mention a pretty nice interop with C-style libraries. It looks like the intent here might be a custom database engine for service integrations... not necessarily a full rdbms in and of itself.

by tracker1

4/11/2026 at 1:13:50 AM

>But what about GC pauses

GC is like auto transmission, it's an inevitable natural evolution of programming languages.

I think the future of programming languages will have hybrid modes of GC and manual, similar to today's hybrid auto transmission automatic and manual in state-of-the-art hypercar [1]. I considered D language as pioneer in this innovative approach.

My hypothesis is that GC can be made deterministic like manual memory management, just like how ICE auto industry minimize the manual transmission. Heck, no manual for EV.

Hopefully the new io_uring facility with BPF controlled can enable this deterministic GC [2],[3].

[1] Here’s how Koenigsegg’s new manual/automatic CC850 gearbox work (2025):

https://www.topgear.com/car-news/supercars/heres-how-koenigs...

[2] BPF meets io_uring (2026):

https://lwn.net/Articles/847951/

[3] How io_uring and eBPF Will Revolutionize Programming in Linux (2020):

https://www.scylladb.com/2020/05/05/how-io_uring-and-ebpf-wi...

by teleforce

4/10/2026 at 8:05:07 PM

Regarding tradeoffs:

I've been working with C# for most of my career, almost 25 years, since .Net 1.0. One of the huge things that I love about Rust is the lack of a runtime framework. I don't need to figure out how to bundle / ship / install a framework at runtime.

(I also like Cargo better than Nuget, but that's a very subjective opinion.)

Which leads to probably the biggest tradeoff:

> Typhon is an embedded...

It's probably hard, (or impossible) to use Typhon outside of the dotnet ecosystem. Granted, it's been years (since the 1.0 days) since I built a .dll that a native application could pull in, there are complications when you "impose" dotnet into an application that isn't dotnet. These don't happen when your library is 100% native, which you get with C/C++/Rust.

by gwbas1c

4/10/2026 at 9:01:50 PM

> One of the huge things that I love about Rust is the lack of a runtime framework. I don't need to figure out how to bundle / ship / install a framework at runtime.

Rust has a runtime, it's just tiny and auto-bundled (for now). Modern .NET's support for self-contained bundling has gotten pretty good. AOT is getting better too, and AOT-ready code (switch Reflection for Source Generators as much as possible, for instance) can do some very heavy treeshaking of the runtime.

Also, yeah native embedding has gotten somewhat easier in recent years depending on the style of API you want to present to native code. Furthermore both Godot and Unity (differently) embed .NET/C# as options in game development. I certainly expect Typhon is primarily targeting Godot and/or (eventually) Unity (when it finishes switching to coreclr to support more of these features) embedding (but maybe also Stride, a fully C# game engine).

by WorldMaker

4/10/2026 at 8:29:00 PM

I think the developer is specifically targeting running in game engines in Unity, because that's already a C# capable environment.

Personally I'm not worried about the micro optimization, I'm more a "why are you attempting to compete with sqlite" person.

by pjc50

4/10/2026 at 6:21:00 PM

I would be less worried about the GC pause, than the need to reserve some memory for garbage collection. Any reduction in available memory is going to tend to mean a hit to performance.

by nitwit005

4/10/2026 at 11:55:15 PM

We have a pretty fast InMemory Database for .Net as well, named InMemory.Net!

by InMemoryNet

4/10/2026 at 4:41:46 PM

C# is a great language with almost unlimited power and great ergonomics (as the article shows), but the .NET CLR (runtime) is a bit overcomplicated with a distinct "Java smell", and packaging and distribution is still meh.

If they could make the developer experience similar to Go, it would rule the world...

by jaen

4/10/2026 at 5:28:12 PM

> If they could make the developer experience similar to Go, it would rule the world...

You can already AOT compile .NET software to an executable to run on whichever platform you need, just like Go.

Libraries need to be published into a package manager (NuGet) which is more friction than just importing from Git repos but it's not that bad.

by Rohansi

4/10/2026 at 6:02:05 PM

AOT is not a panacea and comes with some restrictions/trade-offs that need understood before depending on it in production.

by hnrodey

4/10/2026 at 9:56:58 PM

You also have the option to do single file deployment where it self-extracts the runtime when you run it. It's not as nice but it works and maintains full compatibility.

by Rohansi

4/10/2026 at 9:22:53 PM

Losing dynamic PGO by using AOT compilation could be a detriment to performance in long-running applications, right?

by ziml77

4/11/2026 at 1:07:16 AM

wouldn't you have the same restrictions/tradeoffs using go (or other compiled languages)?

I've never used go, am curious

by peter_griffin

4/11/2026 at 5:47:50 AM

Pretty much, yes. For example reflection is severely limited in .NET AOT vs. JIT, runtime generated code is more common than you'd think and cannot be done AOT. Go was designed for AOT so they already built everything around the limitations because it never supported more.

It'll just take time for .NET to catch up where the dependencies you need automatically work with AOT builds.

by Rohansi

4/10/2026 at 6:43:15 PM

I actually really like the CLR developer experience next to java ngl. I reach for C# in lieu of java (less J2EE SingletonBeanFactoryManagerInstance slop) but particularly F# is pretty nice to use. Haskell has bad tooling, OCaml is getting better thanks to JaneStreet (and if OxCaml gets wide adoption unboxed types are a big perf win) but if nothing else lack of a Rider-esque debugger is just a big time sink.

by landl0rd

4/10/2026 at 4:45:05 PM

I drank the Go kool-aid, then tried to do some high performance things the Go way: didn't work (channels are slow) and I got over it. Still think Go is great for web backends and the like with production grade stdlib.

Great post with details, not a I'm vibe coding...

by karmakaze

4/10/2026 at 5:08:27 PM

> tried to do some high performance things the Go way: didn't work (channels are slow) and I got over it.

What did you choose instead?

by benterix

4/10/2026 at 6:39:21 PM

I'd say modern C++ is high level and ergonomic enough to stop considering any language with a GC.

by zerr

4/10/2026 at 6:48:52 PM

Does C++ have build in memory management now?

by drfloyd51

4/10/2026 at 6:06:47 PM

I wonder why he didn't use AOT compiling if he's worried about JIT warmup.

by DeathArrow

4/10/2026 at 6:38:01 PM

It wasn't discussed, so we're left to speculate. If I had to guess, I imagine that the .NET JIT has actual benefits: the variety of architectures has gotten enormous and JIT is likely a performance win after warmup.

by topspin

4/10/2026 at 11:00:33 PM

.NET JIT supports dynamic PGO.

by zigzag312

4/10/2026 at 8:08:02 PM

My guess is because .NET AoT is not yet optimized and mature enough as JIT. This is known and is on the agenda of Microsoft but it will take time to get there.

by littlecranky67

4/10/2026 at 6:29:03 PM

That seems great, I have seen a few similar dbs written in java that say the same thing, that when written correctly you can get the perf very close to C, but at that point you are just writing C with a different syntax. You don't win on any in the security guarantees, so at that point can we just not build everything in wasm and then we can interface it from both dotnet and the jvm?

by alex7o

4/10/2026 at 7:28:56 PM

Am amused that someone feels compelled to justify writing a db in C#. Such conscientiousness!

I'm not sure authors of Cassandra, ElasticSearch, MongoDB (and more...?) ever had the slightest twinge of uncertainty about whether a managed memory env would cause far more problems than it fixed, even with less native tooling than in C#. Java bros DGAF

by kerblang

4/10/2026 at 8:10:24 PM

Mongo’s c++ isn’t it?

by cyberpunk

4/10/2026 at 8:14:38 PM

Yes

by leosanchez

4/10/2026 at 6:51:34 PM

You do you.

by achillesheels

4/10/2026 at 9:02:06 PM

[dead]

by johnwhitman