> 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?
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
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 is more important for performance TBH JIT warmup isn't a huge issue for a long-running process
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.
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.
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.
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):
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.
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...
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?
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
43 comments
> 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?
Span is more important for performance TBH JIT warmup isn't a huge issue for a long-running process
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.
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.
>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...
If they could make the developer experience similar to Go, it would rule the world...
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