If you have any questions I'll be sure to answer them.

We recently crossed a massive usage milestone with over 3M weekly downloads (we're nearly at 4M!) - see https://www.npmjs.com/package/@electric-sql/pglite

While we originally built this for embedding into web apps, we have seen enormous growth in devtools and developer environments - both Google Firebase and Prisma have embedded PGlite into their CLIs to emulate their server products.

https://github.com/electric-sql/pglite/issues/89 makes it sound like there's "third-party" bindings for Rust. Is there any interest in "official" PGLite bindings to other languages?

The result is a PG server that fully lives in your browser: https://dbfor.dev

The ability to .clone() the database to create "checkpoints" is also great for tests, as we can run all of the migrations and return to that clean state between each test. Running 50 test suites in parallel is also so easy with this setup.

Is there a way to compile this as a native library? I imagine some of the work should be reusable.

I've never used Postgres before, my work is mostly on the embedded domain using files and a lot of browser execution on the client side.

With SQLite there is simplicity attached to the databases, with PGLite I see a lot of interesting extensions to try out but what would the big difference when compared to SQLite?

But I read the following posts, and I have some serious concerns about PGlite's performance:

https://antoine.fi/sqlite-sync-engine-with-reactivity – describes memory leaks, minute-long db startup time, and huge slowdowns with live queries

https://github.com/marcus-pousette/sqlite3-bench - shows performance dropping to multi-second territory for inserts and lookups, compared to sqlite which is significantly faster

It sadly makes me slightly skeptical about adopting what effectively feels like a hack... SQLite has obviously had decades of adoption and I'm not expecting PGlite to match that level of legacy or optimisation - but it's enough to give me pause.

I really, really want to adopt PGlite in a project I'm currently architecting, so would love some insight on this if anybody has any!

[1] https://docs.doltgres.com/introduction/installation

Impressive performance: https://pglite.dev/benchmarks

Even has Drizzle ORM integration: https://orm.drizzle.team/docs/connect-pglite

I will explore this for use in my unit / integration tests. It looks pretty amazing.

I am confused why all my recent compiled tooling (tsgo, biomejs) are shipping native binaries (thus creating multiple binaries, one per supported platform) and not WASM tools that can run cross platform? Is it because of startup times, poor tooling, etc?

AI-generated code that doesn’t need to be production ready has been a real boon to usability and design work. Testing with users something that actually saves and displays data, and seeding the app with realistic-looking datasets in both shape and size, reveals usability issues that you just don’t discover in Figma prototypes.

If a product team isn’t performing user research with interactive prototypes as a core part of their dev and design lifecycle, they’re doing themselves a real disservice. It’s so easy now.

For a few edge-case scenarios we ended up mocking the DB layer (which obviously stops being a true e2e test). Something like PgLite would've been a perfect middle ground - real Postgres, zero container overhead, easy to spin up isolated instances per test, and a clean slate for every run.

I understand the obvious limitations of it being embedded/single-host, but I'm curious about the engine itself. Does running in this environment compromise standard features like ACID compliance, parallel query execution, or the ecosystem of tools/extensions we usually rely on?

Now, I just tested against a real database in a docker container. I have over 1k tests that run about 1.5 mins. I’m pretty happy with that.

I guess given that, testing isn’t quite the use case for this (for me). Wonder what else this could be used for.

I've been using SQLite locally instead with wa-sqlite and it's been working great for my use case so far. It's also more lightweight.

Definitely going to try this out for tests and see how it goes.

Nonetheless, this could be interesting for data heavy SPA's.

I have built a playground for it today: https://playcode.io/sql-editor

(Full feature set, including extensions, pgdump, database explorer, indexedDB, vscode editor, etc). Free. No ads. No bs.

Here's the project if anyone is interested: https://github.com/adhamsalama/sqlite-wasm-webrtc

At this point, this should be built into the browser which could fetch signed db data and be extremely performant.