Top all-time · #763
TigerBeetle Blog
Company blog · tigerbeetle.com/blog · on HN as jorangreefsystemsprogrammingdata
TigerBeetle Blog is the company blog at tigerbeetle.com, writing about systems, programming and data. Since 2021, 86 different Hacker News readers have linked it 148 times, most often “1M TPS – The world’s fastest financial accounting database, written in Zig”. It is still writing: the last post was on 2026-09-17, and you can follow it by feed.
Rarely recommended · 5 of 40 sampled comments recommend it?
Why HN links it
HN readers link TigerBeetle's blog for its engineering posts on static memory allocation, I/O over io_uring and kqueue, and simulation testing, often in threads about Zig and databases.
Summarised by Claude from a sample of 40 HN comments that link here. Each comment is marked recommending, critical or neutral (citing without judging); how this works.
The financial transactions database to power the next 30 years of Online Transaction Processing.
Most-linked posts?
- 1M TPS – The world’s fastest financial accounting database, written in Zig26 people · 29 mentions · first linked 2022-09-22
- We Put a Distributed Database in the Browser – and Made a Game of It6 people · 7 mentions · first linked 2023-07-11
- Synadia and TigerBeetle Pledge $512k to the Zig Software Foundation5 people · 6 mentions · first linked 2025-10-25
- /5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2023-07-13
- We Designed TigerBeetle's Docs from Scratch5 people · 5 mentions · first linked 2025-02-27
- Enum of Arrays4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2024-12-20
- The write last, read first rule4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2025-11-06
- A database without dynamic memory allocation4 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2022-10-13
- Fuzzer Blind Spots: Meet Jepsen3 people · 4 mentions · first linked 2025-06-06
- Simulation Testing for Liveness3 people · 3 mentions · first linked 2023-07-07
What Hacker News says?
There's an actual production grade database written in zig: https://tigerbeetle.com/
Comment linking /
on “Open-source Zig book”Submitted Code review can be better as a story · 391 points
HN discussionFor those interested, Tigerbeetle[0] is a high-peformance purpose built accounting database. It supports - double entry transfer - two-phase transfers (ie reserve an amount and post it later) - linked transfers (move money across multiple accounts atomically) Worth looking at. [0] - https://www.tigerbeetle.com/ & https://github.com/coilhq/tigerbeetle
Comment linking /
on “Accounting For Developers, Part I”Submitted A database without dynamic memory allocation as a story · 359 points
HN discussionBtw for those wondering what to do instead is to simply use https://tigerbeetle.com/
Comment linking /
on “Engineers do not get to make startup mistakes when they build ledgers”Submitted Synadia and TigerBeetle Pledge $512k to the Zig Software Foundation as a story · 177 points
HN discussionconsider his another post in somewhat similar spirit: https://tigerbeetle.com/blog/2024-12-19-enum-of-arrays/ the author is indeed working in a performance-oriented niche
Comment linking /blog/2024-12-19-enum-of-arrays/
on “Push Ifs Up and Fors Down”Submitted Enum of Arrays as a story · 146 points
HN discussionWe could not have written TigerBeetle, at least not the way it is, without Zig: https://tigerbeetle.com/blog/2025-10-25-synadia-and-tigerbee...
Comment linking /blog/2025-10-25-synadia-and-tigerbeetle-pledge-512k-to-the-zig-software-foundation/
on “Why is Zig so cool?”Submitted A programmer-friendly I/O abstraction over io_uring and kqueue as a story · 123 points
HN discussionThe TigerBeetle database is built this way, and I kind of love the concept https://tigerbeetle.com/blog/a-database-without-dynamic-memo...
Comment linking /blog/a-database-without-dynamic-memory
on “Porting my JavaScript game engine to C for no reason”Submitted A programmer-friendly I/O abstraction over io_uring and kqueue (2022) as a story · 119 points
HN discussionI'm waiting for someone to implement the Redis API by swapping out the state machine in TigerBeetle (which was built modularly such that the state machine can be swapped out). https://tigerbeetle.com/
Comment linking /
on “Redis re-implemented with SQLite”Submitted The write last, read first rule as a story · 102 points
HN discussionTigerBeetle's excellent companion blog - https://tigerbeetle.com/blog/2025-10-25-synadia-and-tigerbee...
Comment linking /blog/2025-10-25-synadia-and-tigerbeetle-pledge-512k-to-the-zig-software-foundation/
on “Synadia and TigerBeetle Commit $512k USD to the Zig Software Foundation”Submitted TigerBeetle and Synadia pledge $512k to the Zig Software Foundation as a story · 102 points
HN discussionTigerBeetle: https://tigerbeetle.com/blog/
Comment linking /blog/
on “Ask HN: What are the best engineering blogs with real-world depth?”Submitted Rediscovering Transaction Processing from History and First Principles as a story · 100 points
HN discussionHere's their blog post from 2023 explaining what they did: https://tigerbeetle.com/blog/2023-07-11-we-put-a-distributed...
Comment linking /blog/2023-07-11-we-put-a-distributed-database-in-the-browser/
on “Systems Correctness Practices at Amazon Web Services”Submitted A Tale of Four Fuzzers as a story · 79 points
HN discussionI wonder if they considered https://tigerbeetle.com
Comment linking /
on “Migrating Uber's ledger data from DynamoDB to LedgerStore”Submitted We Designed TigerBeetle's Docs from Scratch as a story · 72 points
HN discussionMy guess is that Zig's design choices are hitting "a sweeter sweet spot" for systems programming that resonates with many engineers reading HN. At least for TigerBeetle [1], a distributed database, the story was strong enough even last year that we were prepared to paddle out and wait for the swell to break, rather than be saddled for years with undefined behavior and broken/slow tooling, or else a steep learning cu…
Comment linking /
on “Zig 0.9.0”Submitted Three Clocks Are Better Than One as a story · 63 points
HN discussion> Instructive here is Tigerbeetle, a financial database written entirely with Vanilla Zig: How does TigerBeetle's existence support the argument that rolling your own dependencies is better than using off-the-shelf tools? TigerBeetle has existed as a company for less than three years, they haven't reached a 1.0 release, and they have a single-digit number of engineers. As far as I can tell, they haven't even reached…
Comment linking /blog/2025-02-27-why-we-designed-tigerbeetles-docs-from-scratch/
on “NIH is cheaper than the wrong dependency”Submitted Fuzzer Blind Spots: Meet Jepsen as a story · 40 points
HN discussionWe apply this pretty much fully at TigerBeetle [1]. Reason being that TigerStyle is not only about shipping safer software, but shipping it in less time [2], factoring in the Total Cost of Ownership to end users. In other words, not only optimizing our development time, but also all the time spent in production with subsequent fixes. [1] https://tigerbeetle.com/blog/2025-02-27-why-we-designed-tige... [2] https://www…
Comment linking /blog/2025-02-27-why-we-designed-tigerbeetles-docs-from-scratch/
on “NIH is cheaper than the wrong dependency”Submitted TigerBeetle – Financial accounting database as a story · 27 points
HN discussionThe way I understand it yes. Latency will be dictated by going to the leader node and replication to enough followers. The CAP theorem dictates that if you want strong consistency the way they offer you have to talk to a quorum of nodes IIRC N/2 + 1. Paxos and Raft also work that way. Apparently there is a game about it https://tigerbeetle.com/blog/2023-07-11-we-put-a-distributed...
Comment linking /blog/2023-07-11-we-put-a-distributed-database-in-the-browser/
on “TigerBeetle is a most interesting database”Submitted 64-Bit Bank Balances ‘Ought to Be Enough for Anybody’? as a story · 18 points
HN discussion
