What's this about?
Turso, the company that famously rewrote SQLite in Rust, announced its next act: rebuilding Postgres on the same Rust core. Their framing: Turso becomes "the LLVM of databases" — one modern, reliable engine, with multiple database "frontends" (SQLite first, Postgres next, others later) compiled onto it. The goal is a ground-up Postgres-compatible database with a modern architecture: no process-per-connection, runs embedded in a browser or as a file, self-updating materialized views.
What exactly is "the LLVM of databases"?
LLVM is the compiler infrastructure that lets many languages (C, Rust, Swift...) share one common optimizing backend — write a language frontend, get a world-class compiler for free. Turso wants the same split for databases: the hard storage/transaction engine is built once, and "being Postgres" or "being SQLite" becomes a compatibility layer on top. If it works, new database flavors become far cheaper to build.
What's the community saying?
- Ambition respect — rewriting *both* SQLite and Postgres is either visionary or hubris; Turso points to its SQLite rewrite as proof it can execute.
- simonw's take — expanding beyond SQLite "makes the project a whole lot more interesting," validating the multi-frontend strategy.
- AI-era subtext — modern embedded databases (browser, file, edge) are exactly what agent-heavy applications keep reaching for.