On 30 Aug 2013, at 4:46pm, Jay A. Kreibich <j...@kreibi.ch> wrote: > On Fri, Aug 30, 2013 at 03:41:18PM +0100, Simon Slavin scratched on the wall: > >> The arguments against DLLs are not the normal arguments you see, >> they're governed by an unusual combination of four characteristics of SQLite: >> >> A) SQLite is very much liked, and a huge number of programs use it. >> B) SQLite is tiny. You don't waste much disk space by having lots of copies. >> C) There are frequent version updates to SQLite which introduce new >> facilities. >> D) SQLite is detailed and complicated, so updates sometimes break >> assumptions made by programmers. > > I'm not sure that last one is fair. Generally, the SQLite team makes > a huge effort to avoid breaking backwards compatibility, both documented > and assumed. There are a whole list of known bugs that will never get > fixed because they might break existing applications. While there > are some changes to the query optimizer that sometimes do odd things, > overall this is a pretty poor reason.
While I take your point there have been numerous examples in the last year of what I would call 'assumptions made by programmers' which aren't obvious bugs. For example the user who had a SELECT where a calculation was named the same as a column which actually existed in the table, and one version of SQLite did one thing, and another did the other. It was only possible to identify one of them as a bug by detailed examination of a late version of the SQL standard. Without that they were both arguably acceptable SQL. > For me, the biggest issue is A and B, combined with the fact that > many applications that very heavily use and integrate SQLite often > have a custom compile with specific extensions, default values, and > features turned on or off. That's one I missed. Yes: very many compilation options, with none obviously better than others. Therefore different people want different object code. For me the biggest argument is that the SQLite dev team go to the effort of making amalgamation source code available, which I think is wonderful. But I wasn't brought up in the world of Windows programming where you expect everything to be a DLL, and I can understand someone who was wondering why anyone ever did anything but use the a 'standard' DLL. Simon. _______________________________________________ sqlite-users mailing list sqlite-users@sqlite.org http://sqlite.org:8080/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/sqlite-users
