alt.hn

5/18/2026 at 4:56:04 PM

Aether: High-performance, formally-verified storage engine written in Rust

 https://codeberg.org/gregburd/aether

by dboreham

5/19/2026 at 8:05:01 AM

The rest of the comments, as of now, are unreasonably unsubstantiated and a little bit hostile. AFAICS it's a large effort combining some pretty damn cool ideas from database internals world - this must have been written by someone experienced. It reminded me of RocksDB immediately, and wanted to see the example of integration, but then I saw redis, memcached, and "financial" database workload/protocol implementations. Good stuff, especially the benchmarks.

The code was obviously written using LLMs and I don't say this because the code looks like it's been LLM-generated but because of the fact that no sane person would have been able to write such complex piece of software in the pre-AI era. To me personally it shows how things dramatically shifted in software, and how domain expertise along with the AI became not 10x but 100x multiplier.

by menaerus

5/19/2026 at 9:15:03 PM

> no sane person would have been able to write such complex piece of software in the pre-AI era.

Insane take

by coffeeindex

5/20/2026 at 6:48:32 AM

Why do you say so?

by menaerus

5/18/2026 at 7:48:10 PM

It's so hard to trust a vibe coded software with something with a thing as valuable as data.

I see no reason why would anyone even bother checking this out, while there a trusted, battle scared, and non vibe-coded alternatives such as postgres, duckdb,boltdb,SQLite.

Sorry mate.

by localhoster

5/19/2026 at 6:19:04 AM

Yeah it seems pretty insane to use a vibe-coded storage engine unless you had no other option

by Gerharddc

5/18/2026 at 7:57:33 PM

Formal verification should catch vibe coding bugs.

by br1

5/18/2026 at 11:00:03 PM

This is the entire formal verification effort, as far as I can tell: https://codeberg.org/gregburd/aether/src/branch/main/aether/...

They use TLA+ with TLC which model checks the write ahead log (a component of the system). But that only models the WAL protocol, not the actual Rust code and not the other 99% of the system.

Any formal verification is of course awesome to see though.

by sangel

5/19/2026 at 2:42:09 AM

I have to admit I used to think any level of formal verification was worthwhile.

But I recently tried having agents try starting with formal models, and then building code using that as basis. In the end to models were never detailed enough to catch the most common issues that were shaken out with getting a high level of coverage and mutation testing.

At which point, the predictive power of the formal models became somewhat vacuous.

I’m trying to be more optimistic that maybe using dependently typed languages will yield better results.

by onair4you

5/18/2026 at 9:30:04 PM

The part that’s not clear to me is, does the spec actually align with what’s been implemented, or has the spec only been formally verified. I think the risk with vibe coding this sort of thing is that claude assures you the rust code implements the spec when it doesn’t

by oinoom

5/19/2026 at 4:17:34 AM

I don't think formally verifying my showing that the model is correct is good enough anymore. You must prove that your implementation refines the model.

by Kab1r

5/19/2026 at 9:26:23 PM

Formally verified only matters if the implementation actually improves the model, not just matches it in some abstract way. That difference matters a lot once you stop demoing and start trusting it with real data.

by ryanshrott

5/19/2026 at 6:28:52 PM

As far as names go, Aether is or was a P2P social network

by erelong

5/18/2026 at 9:25:16 PM

big words, either you are a genius, or it's AI slop and we'd be better off using write(). Don't think there's inbetween.

by TZubiri