🦀 Turso Is Silently Dethroning SQLite

Today’s Issue: Making Rust’s Reference Counting Friendlier, Jon Gjengset Chats with JetBrains, and a Look at Effects in Rust

Image: Turso Logo

Hello, Rustaceans

Hope you had a productive work week.

In this issue, we’ll discuss Turso’s beta release, present a Rust challenge, spotlight an amazing Rust project, and share 10 incredible links of the week.

Here’s issue 88 for you!

MAIN NEWS

Turso Is Silently Dethroning SQLite

Last week was full of surprises, including a critical “Use After Free” vulnerability discovered in Redis that’s been hiding in plain sight for 13 years.

Thirteen! It’s a sharp reminder of why memory safety isn’t just a talking point, it’s the whole ballgame.

Meanwhile, the Rustaceans over at Turso spent the week showing off what they’ve been cooking up, think of it as their own little Tech Week, but with way more Rust.

Their beta launch of a Rust-powered rewrite of SQLite wasn’t just a flex, it was a glimpse at how the next generation of databases might run.

Here are a few features from the release that caught my eye:

• Let’s start with Concurrent Writes. Using MVCC (Multi-Version Concurrency Control), Turso lets multiple transactions party at once without locking each other out. Benchmarks show up to 4x faster writes, and those SQLITE_BUSY errors? Gone. Your CPU cores finally get to earn their keep.

• Then there’s Turso Sync, aka “Databases That Teleport.” It lets your local SQLite instances sync seamlessly with the cloud, so your app can run offline, update data on the go, and magically sync when you’re back online. Conflict resolution? Handled. Edge deployment? Easy.

Oh, and Encryption? Yeah, that’s native now. Turso bakes it right in. With just a ~6% read overhead, it’s fast, transparent, and open source. Perfect if your app deals with sensitive stuff like fintech data, user info, or the occasional spicy AI dataset.

SQLite walked so Turso could replicate, encrypt, and scale. Whether it’s in your browser, your edge node, or your secret AI bunker, your data can now follow you everywhere.

SQLite may have started as your trusty sidekick, but with Turso’s upgrades, it’s starting to look suspiciously like the main character. Touché, Glauber Costa.

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RUST CHALLENGE 🦀

Last week we had you solve the string compression challenge. Big thanks to Nicolas Di Caterina, Nicolas Roman Posner, Alonely0, Pantamis, Amaso, Wilson Miller, and Lesley Lai.

Mirror Index

Given a vector of integers, return the index i such that the sum of all elements to the left of i equals the sum of all elements to the right of i.

If multiple such indices exist, return the middlemost one (closest to the center).

If none exist, return -1.

Image: Rust_Bytes_Challenge_Issue_88_Mirror_Index

Test your solution on Rust Playground. Once completed, please share your solution and tag us either on X, BlueSky, Mastodon, LinkedIn, or reply to this email.

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Help Us Improve Rust Bytes

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Your feedback means a lot, take a minute to share your thoughts.

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PROJECT SPOTLIGHT 💡

Typst

Image: Typst_ Banner

If you’ve ever wrestled with LaTeX and thought, “There has to be an easier way”, Typst is that way.

The problem Typst is tackling is simple but painful: writing beautiful, structured documents shouldn’t feel like deciphering cryptic compiler errors.

LaTeX veterans know the drill, miss one curly brace, and suddenly your bibliography vanishes into the void.

Typst fixes that with a modern syntax, human-readable markup, and instant feedback, so you can focus on content, not debugging.

Here’s why developers love Typst:

• Blazing-fast compilation - Incremental builds mean your document updates in real time. No more coffee breaks between edits.

• Simple markup, powerful logic - You can go from headings to recursive Fibonacci tables without leaving your .typ file.

• Built-in everything - Math, bibliographies, scripting, it’s all included out of the box. No endless \usepackage scavenger hunts.

Also to be noted is that Typst has friendly errors, and when things go wrong, it tells you why, in plain English. Revolutionary, right?

Typst is open-source on GitHub at https://github.com/typst/typst.

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AWESOME LINKS OF THE WEEK 🔗

1. Niko Matsakis wrote about ongoing efforts to improve Rust’s ergonomic reference counting, proposing a new Handle trait to clarify shared ownership and “entanglement” in cloned values.

2. Databento’s Rustaceans explained why their feed handler didn’t get the Rust rewrite treatment - yes, sometimes ‘rewrite it in Rust’ isn’t the answer.

3. Kilari Teja open-sourced ut, a fast, lightweight CLI toolkit bundling essential developer and IT utilities into one binary -because who needs fifty separate tools?

4. Vaktibabat wrote “Fun With HyperLogLog and SIMD”, a deep dive into low-memory cardinality estimation, boosted with SIMD and multithreading. It benchmarks across datasets and even outperforms several Python, Go, and Rust libraries.

5. Paweł Urbanek shows how to catch your Rust app slacking off with automatic performance profiling. No more manual detective work.

6. Jon Gjengset (author of Rust for Rustaceans) interviewed with JetBrains and talked about Rust, 400K salaries, AI, defense, and the ecosystem. [video]

7. Viacheslav Biriukov wrote Async Rust with Tokio I/O streams, demonstrating how blocking writes affect reads, how TCP backpressure emerges, and practical patterns to handle cancellation gracefully in complex async loops.

8. Aloso’s Effects in Rust (and Koka) compares Rust’s ownership and type system with Koka’s expressive effect system, and debates ongoing Rust efforts such as keyword generics to support async, const, and fallible behavior more seamlessly.

9. Worakarn Isaratham from Agoda Engineering wrote why Agoda’s Feature Store runs faster and safer now that they’ve bet big on Rust.

10. Preventing Invalid Database Access At Compile Time demonstrates how to use Rust’s type system to prevent invalid database writes by distinguishing read-only and writable connections, catching misuse at compile time instead of runtime.

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CodeCrafters: Become a Better Rust Engineer

CodeCrafters created amazing Rust courses that push your skills beyond the basics.

You’ll have fun building real-world projects from scratch, including Git, Docker, Redis, Kafka, SQLite, Grep, BitTorrent, HTTP Server, an Interpreter, and DNS.

The courses are self-paced, so you can learn at your own speed. If you’re itching to level up your Rust skills, these courses are perfect for you.

Join for free and get 40% off when you upgrade. [affiliate]

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I visited my friends and we’ve been having good times together and laughs.

That's all for now, Rustaceans.

John & Elley.