I hear you. As someone who lost rest of his hair during last 10 years talking to frontend kids claiming that types are for grannies - I'm on your side.
But having that said, sqlite has a niche application and you can enforce types on app layer, the same way you do it with web apps. Trust, but verify. Better - don't trust at all. At the end of the day the way I see it - it's just like protobuffers et al. - you put some data into a black box stream of bytes and it's your responsiblity to ensure correctness on both ends.
@serverless
It's twofold. On one hand you have the ability to move faster. On the other you have less moving parts that need maintenance and can break. Plus, for me personally, it's the default mindset. Let me give you an example - in 2025 still most online shops have filters that will trigger a full reload of the web page.
When I'm clicking on TVs in a shop I don't need to reload the webpage everytime I click on something, the app could easily got the whole stock in single json and filter results on the fly while I'm fiddling with filters. Sure it doesn't work for amazon, but it works for 95% of shops online. Yet no one is doing it. Why?
My point - I'm looking for a way to simplify processes, and for some niche applications it's just more convenient.
RE: serverless, I think I understand the use-case and I get the homogeneity argument, it's just that to me SQLite mostly wins for being embedded; the rest of its traits are a nice bonus but using stuff e.g. Litestream I don't view as super important. And I would change a good amount of its internals if it were up to me. But! It helps you, you are using it, you are happy with it -- cool!
RE: stricter types, oh, I am adding a ton of code to verify types, absolutely. My upcoming FFI library (Elixir -> Rust -> SQLite) will have a lot of "raw" FFI bridges to SQLite with some good sensible default checks but ultimately I'd leave it to the users (programmers) of the library to f.ex. make sure that the field `price` in each result from the set is in fact a `REAL` (float / double) value. That's going to be the next game though, the "raw" FFI stuff will just make sure nothing ever crashes / panics (as much as I can guarantee; obviously I can't stop the OS killing the process or running out of disk or memory) and return errors as detailed and as machine-readable as they can be (major selling point, at least for me when I start dogfooding it). Just today I started working on using interruptible SQLite operations (via its progress handler mechanism) and it's almost done and I'll release it via a PR. Which will also make the library near-real-time friendly (I am aiming at 1-10 ms pauses between each check-in at most even if you are fetching a million records). Etc.
So yeah, no trust and a lot of verification indeed. But I would still like to have some more safety around executing raw SQL (not talking injection here) where e.g. you are never allowed to insert a string into an integer column.
It's hard to complain though. SQLite is one of the very very best softwares ever made. If the price for using it is to write some more conservative validation code at the edges then that's still a fantastic deal and I am happy to do it.
I hear you. As someone who lost rest of his hair during last 10 years talking to frontend kids claiming that types are for grannies - I'm on your side. But having that said, sqlite has a niche application and you can enforce types on app layer, the same way you do it with web apps. Trust, but verify. Better - don't trust at all. At the end of the day the way I see it - it's just like protobuffers et al. - you put some data into a black box stream of bytes and it's your responsiblity to ensure correctness on both ends.
@serverless
It's twofold. On one hand you have the ability to move faster. On the other you have less moving parts that need maintenance and can break. Plus, for me personally, it's the default mindset. Let me give you an example - in 2025 still most online shops have filters that will trigger a full reload of the web page. When I'm clicking on TVs in a shop I don't need to reload the webpage everytime I click on something, the app could easily got the whole stock in single json and filter results on the fly while I'm fiddling with filters. Sure it doesn't work for amazon, but it works for 95% of shops online. Yet no one is doing it. Why?
My point - I'm looking for a way to simplify processes, and for some niche applications it's just more convenient.