Project Limbo

Limbo is a project to build the modern evolution of SQLite.

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Features and Roadmap

Limbo is a work-in-progress, in-process OLTP database engine library written in Rust that has:

• Asynchronous I/O support on Linux with io_uring
• SQLite compatibility [doc] for SQL dialect, file formats, and the C API
• Language bindings for JavaScript/WebAssembly, Rust, Go, Python, and Java
• OS support for Linux, macOS, and Windows

In the future, we will be also workin on:

• Integrated vector search for embeddings and vector similarity.
• BEGIN CONCURRENT for improved write throughput.
• Improved schema management including better ALTER support and strict column types by default.

Getting Started

💻 Command Line

You can install the latest limbo release with:

curl --proto '=https' --tlsv1.2 -LsSf \
  https://github.com/tursodatabase/limbo/releases/latest/download/limbo-installer.sh | sh

Then launch the shell to execute SQL statements:

Limbo
Enter ".help" for usage hints.
Connected to a transient in-memory database.
Use ".open FILENAME" to reopen on a persistent database
limbo> CREATE TABLE users (id INT PRIMARY KEY, username TEXT);
limbo> INSERT INTO users VALUES (1, 'alice');
limbo> INSERT INTO users VALUES (2, 'bob');
limbo> SELECT * FROM users;
1|alice
2|bob

You can also build and run the latest development version with:

cargo run

✨ JavaScript (wip)

Installation:

npm i limbo-wasm

Example usage:

import { Database } from 'limbo-wasm';

const db = new Database('sqlite.db');
const stmt = db.prepare('SELECT * FROM users');
const users = stmt.all();
console.log(users);

🐍 Python (wip)

pip install pylimbo

Example usage:

import limbo

con = limbo.connect("sqlite.db")
cur = con.cursor()
res = cur.execute("SELECT * FROM users")
print(res.fetchone())

🐹 Go (wip)

1. Clone the repository
2. Build the library and set your LD_LIBRARY_PATH to include limbo's target directory

cargo build --package limbo-go
export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=/path/to/limbo/target/debug:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH

3. Use the driver

go get github.com/tursodatabase/limbo
go install github.com/tursodatabase/limbo

Example usage:

import (
    "database/sql"
    _"github.com/tursodatabase/limbo"
)

conn, _ = sql.Open("sqlite3", "sqlite.db")
defer conn.Close()

stmt, _ := conn.Prepare("select * from users")
defer stmt.Close()

rows, _ = stmt.Query()
for rows.Next() {
    var id int 
    var username string
    _ := rows.Scan(&id, &username)
    fmt.Printf("User: ID: %d, Username: %s\n", id, username)
}

Contributing

We'd love to have you contribute to Limbo! Please check out the contribution guide to get started.

FAQ

How is Limbo different from Turso's libSQL?

Limbo is a project to build the modern evolution of SQLite in Rust, with a strong open contribution focus and features like native async support, vector search, and more. The libSQL project is also an attempt to evolve SQLite in a similar direction, but through a fork rather than a rewrite.

Rewriting SQLite in Rust started as an unassuming experiment, and due to its incredible success, replaces libSQL as our intended direction. At this point, libSQL is production ready, Limbo is not - although it is evolving rapidly. As the project start to near production readiness, we plan to rename it to just "Turso". More details here.

Publications

• Pekka Enberg, Sasu Tarkoma, Jon Crowcroft Ashwin Rao (2024). Serverless Runtime / Database Co-Design With Asynchronous I/O. In EdgeSys ‘24. [PDF]
• Pekka Enberg, Sasu Tarkoma, and Ashwin Rao (2023). Towards Database and Serverless Runtime Co-Design. In CoNEXT-SW ’23. [PDF] [Slides]

License

This project is licensed under the MIT license.

Contribution

Unless you explicitly state otherwise, any contribution intentionally submitted for inclusion in Limbo by you, shall be licensed as MIT, without any additional terms or conditions.