Why I'm Building a Database Engine in C#
5 hours ago
- #Database Engineering
- #Embedded Systems
- #C# Performance
- Typhon is an embedded ACID database engine written in C# with sub-microsecond transaction latency, designed for game servers and real-time simulations.
- Despite concerns about GC pauses, C# offers unsafe features, pinned memory, ref structs, and hardware intrinsics that enable low-level control and performance comparable to C/C++.
- Typhon uses cache-line-aware storage, SIMD operations, zero-copy access, and JIT specialization to achieve high performance, with benchmarks showing operations like B+Tree lookups at 267 ns.
- The project leverages .NET's ecosystem for productivity, including logging, testing, and telemetry tools, while using custom Roslyn analyzers to enforce safety rules.
- Memory access patterns are more critical than language choice; Typhon focuses on data-oriented design to minimize cache misses and optimize layout.
- Trade-offs include manual memory safety in unsafe code and JIT warmup, but these are managed through discipline and tooling.