Clockwork Labs retweeted
Probably the most common question I get about @spacetimedb is: "Does it scale?"
It does, but that’s also kind of the wrong question.
There are 3 different dimensions of scaling:
• Storage
• Compute
• Networking
And they each need different solutions.
Clockwork Labs retweeted
Our founder, @TylerFCloutier, breaks down what SpacetimeDB is and why you should care!
youtube.com/watch?v=GSmLNSae…
Clockwork Labs retweeted
🌟 Event Alert: Meteor Shower Incoming! 🌟
A meteor shower is approaching the BitCraft Online Discord, arriving TODAY, July 17th! ☄️
Keep your eyes peeled for Fallen Star Fragments as they appear across BitCraft Online Discord! Be sure to claim them and redeem the code to earn yourself a Beta Cube.
As some of you might have already guessed, Heimlich will also be around assisting you again.
The first person to call Heimlich (click the message) will get the reward. Heimlich will reply to them in a message only they can see. Heimlich will NEVER DM a user for any reason. He only replies in the chat channels.
If you manage to click the message after the Beta Cube has been claimed, but before Heimlich deletes his message, you will get no reply. If you get no reply after clicking the message, it means you were too slow, and someone else got the Code.
Please note that rewards are limited to one claim every 24 hours. Additionally, accounts must be at least one month old to successfully claim any codes. Beta Cube Codes can be redeemed on bitcraftonline.com/account/r…
Not in the Discord yet? Come join us and catch some falling stars!
discord.gg/bitcraft
#BitCraftOnline #MeteorShower #BetaCube #GamingCommunity #DiscordEvent
Clockwork Labs retweeted
Our client ported their C# @spacetimedb code to Rust in ~1 hour and swapped it out live without even disconnecting players...
The future is going to be crazy. 😅
Clockwork Labs retweeted
With @spacetimedb we have our own “equivalence principle”, which is surprisingly similar to Einstein’s.
It says that a database should never be able to detect that it’s running on a particular machine.
From the perspective of database logic, there is no such thing as a reboot, a process restart, or a machine failure.
Infrastructure is an implementation detail. If your database can observe it, you’ve broken the abstraction.
Every violation of the principle is an architecture smell.
RT @spacetimedb: Damn it feels good to drop that understore.
Clockwork Labs retweeted
In March, we released benchmark numbers alongside SpacetimeDB 2.0. After a thorough investigation, we discovered a serious error in SpacetimeDB which caused our results to be misleading. We would like to sincerely apologize to our community.
Read the full article: spacetimedb.com/blog/benchma…
Clockwork Labs retweeted
RSVP for the June 5th hackathon in NYC. $10,000 in prizes!
partiful.com/e/YxvEsJDZYLbJ9…
Join us for a SpacetimeDB Hackathon in NYC on June 5th! Open to all in the area!
RSVP: partiful.com/e/YxvEsJDZYLbJ9…
Clockwork Labs retweeted
Well I'd start by not pretending that "TPC-C Like" is a meaningful standard benchmark:
planetscale.com/benchmarks
We've got an exciting announcement! Today, we're announcing that we're open sourcing, Rish, the reactive Unity UI framework that we developed for BitCraft! Rish is so named, because it's like React-ish! Rish brings reactive declarative UI development to C# and Unity.
- Rish Documentation Website: rish-ui.com/
- Rish Repo: github.com/clockworklabs/Ris…
- Roots (kinda like Bootstrap, it just have some basic elements to use as a starting point): github.com/clockworklabs/Roo…
- Sappy (fast event system, Rish depends on it): github.com/clockworklabs/Sap…
- Motion (animation library, Roots depends on it for animated elements): github.com/clockworklabs/Mot…
Clockwork Labs retweeted
This is exactly the reason we built @spacetimedb. Our game engineers should not need to be distributed systems experts just to build @BitCraftOnline.
SpacetimeDB is fast, but its real value is that by putting your code inside the DB, we can handle the distrib systems for you.
vibecoder asks claude code to build a chat app, gets a working prototype in 20 minutes, immediately tweets "just killed slack and discord"…
brother you don't even know what a distributed system is. you don't know what database replication means. you have no idea how websocket connections behave at scale or what happens when 50k people are online at once and someone's message needs to show up in 200ms across 3 continents
slack has engineers making $300k+ who have spent a decade solving problems you don't even know exist yet. race conditions, eventual consistency, message ordering, presence systems, file storage at scale, search indexing across billions of messages
your app works on localhost with 2 connections. that's not the same thing as "killing slack" that's a college homework assignment
the prototype is maybe 0.5% of what makes these products actually work in production. the remaining 99.5% is infrastructure, reliability, edge cases, and years of iteration on problems that only surface when real humans use your thing at scale
and the worst part is the confidence. "yeah its not perfect but ai one-shotted it, just need to adjust a few things and deploy" - the few things you need to adjust IS the entire product. thats like pouring a foundation and saying you basically built a skyscraper, just need to adjust a few things
ai is genuinely incredible for building tools and prototypes. i use it every day. but there's this weird thing happening where people who have never shipped anything to real users at scale now think the hard part of software is writing the first 200 lines of code
it never was bro
Clockwork Labs retweeted
We launched on Product Hunt today!
SpacetimeDB: Development at the speed of light. producthunt.com/products/spa…
Clockwork Labs retweeted
I see your 720p@20fps video conference and I raise you 12-15 people and screen sharing.
Made by members of our Discord! discord.gg/spacetimedb
Sharded Postgres is closer than you think.
Video conferencing on Neki. 720p. 20fps. Cross-shard queries.
Built by @__spongeboi
RT @spacetimedb: Why you should choose Convex over SpacetimeDB
"Convex is tackling the same fundamental problem we are, and in many areas…
Clockwork Labs retweeted
SpacetimeDB + @claudeai is empowering new devs!
Clockwork Labs retweeted
If you're not following the Elegon vlog, you're missing out!
Elegon is an indie MMORPG being developed on top of SpacetimeDB.
youtube.com/watch?v=68BVjpEi…
Clockwork Labs retweeted
This is a dangerous and fundamental misunderstanding of how SpacetimeDB works. By default, SpacetimeDB waits for all data to be durably persisted to disk BEFORE exposing it to clients.
We have a deeper dive coming, but dataloss is the cardinal sin of databases, and so we need to address this one immediately.
SpacetimeDB can be configured to expose data to clients before data is persisted, but so can Postgres (synchronous_commit = off).
medium.com/@mihir20/understa…
The genius of SpacetimeDB is that although we fsync asynchronously, we buffer all client reads (and write acks) until we've guaranteed they are persisted to disk. Not only does this guarantee durability of transactions from the perspective of clients, it also allows us to decouple fsync latency and fsync throughput. Pipelining is a powerful optimization.
Earlier this week, SpacetimeDB launched v2 of their product with a weird marketing video. It was full of memes, and mocking other databases; their CEO showed up drinking "competitor's tears". I found it off-putting, but it did pique my interest enough to do a technical review of their product.
In summary: it's not a very good database, and it is a big marketing miss. Database marketing is hard! They had a good chance to launch this and make people go "Wow! It's like Redis on steroids! You can build a whole MMORPG on top of this!". But instead they invited some very awkward comparisons with their benchmarks.
Any technical person who looked at their offering probably thought: "Wow, 190k QPS in a relational database? I wonder what's the catch".
The catch is that it's pretty much just an in-memory hash table with a single lock in front of it. Some interesting ideas, some big footguns. But that's pretty much it.
Here's my full technical review, including some thoughts on database marketing, if you're interested 👇
Clockwork Labs retweeted
Replying to @vmg
This is a dangerous and fundamental misunderstanding of how SpacetimeDB works. By default, SpacetimeDB waits for all data to be durably persisted to disk BEFORE exposing it to clients.
The window in which you can lose data not "very small", it's absolutely 0.
SpacetimeDB can be configured to expose data to clients before data is persisted, but so can Postgres (synchronous_commit = off).
The genius of SpacetimeDB is that although we fsync asynchronously, we buffer all client reads (and write acks) until we've guaranteed they are persisted to disk. Not only does this guarantee durability of transactions from the perspective of clients, it also allows us to decouple fsync latency and fsync throughput. Pipelining is a powerful optimization.
medium.com/@mihir20/understa…
That being said, it's understandable how people who spent their careers just operating Postgres instead of designing their own database engine could be so confused.



















