SQLite's Use of Tcl

Summary

SQLite's Use Of Tcl D. Richard Hipp 24th Annual Tcl/Tk Conference Houston, TX 2017-10-19 1.0 Introduction SQLite is a TCL extension that has escaped into the wild. The design of SQLite was inspired by the design of TCL, both in the way it handles datatypes and in the formatting of its source code. The index use case for SQLite was in a Tcl/Tk application for an industrial company. From its inception, SQLite has always depended heavily on TCL. These days, SQLite no longer uses TCL internally and can be run separately from any TCL interpreter, and yet the SQLite development process still depends heavily on TCL. 1.1 About SQLite SQLite is an SQL database engine, and the most widely used database engine in the world. SQLite is built into all cellphones as a core component and is the primary means of data persistence on phones. SQLite is also an integral part of most web browsers. SQLite is built into MacOS and is used by most of the default applications on that platform. Windows10 requires the C:\Windows\System32\winsqlite3.dll file in order to boot. Countless other popular applications like Skype and WhatsApp and iTunes depend on SQLite. Because SQLite is open source and can be freely downloaded and duplicated, exact usage numbers are unavailable. But reasonable estimates are that there are more SQLite instances in operation today than there are people on earth. Most devices that use the SQLite database engine contain hundreds of separate databases, and there are billions of such devices. Hence, there are likely around one trillion SQLite databases in active use. There are more copies of SQLite in use than there are copies of Linux. We know this because SQLite is used on almost all Linux systems, but SQLite is also used on many other non-linux systems such as Macs, iPhones, and Windows computers. By similar arguments, there are more copies of SQLite in use than there are Macs, or Windows PCs. There are probably more copies of SQLite in use than all other database engin...