# 🤖 SQLite: considered alternatives, staying (2026-07-10)

**Decision: lchat stays on SQLite via `modernc.org/sqlite`.** Alternatives were
considered (prompted by discomfort with the SQLite core team's public persona —
the Benedictine "Code of Ethics" page) and rejected. Don't re-litigate this
without new facts; the escape hatch to watch is noted below.

## Why we looked

The SQLite team's [Code of Ethics](https://sqlite.org/codeofethics.html) (the
Rule of St. Benedict, adopted by D. Richard Hipp partly as a statement against
boilerplate CoCs) gives some people pause. Context that defused it: it governs
the three-person core team only, not users or contributors, and the code itself
is **public domain** — no license terms, nothing ideological attaches to the
artifact. Our build dependency is also one step removed already:
`modernc.org/sqlite` is Jan Mercl's machine translation of the C source into
pure Go.

## Alternatives rejected

- **libSQL (Turso)** — the real "same engine, different governance" option: MIT,
  open-contribution fork, same file format + SQL. **Rejected because its Go
  bindings (`go-libsql`) require cgo**, which breaks the single-static-binary
  `CGO_ENABLED=0` deploy that the whole per-instance architecture rests on.
  Turso's ground-up Rust rewrite (ex-"limbo") is not production-ready and also
  not Go-native.
- **Pure-Go KV stores** (bbolt, Badger, Pebble) — no SQL; every query in `db.go`
  becomes hand-rolled index management.
- **Pure-Go SQL engines** (chai/genji) — nowhere near SQLite's testing pedigree;
  unacceptable as the sole datastore of an E2EE messenger.
- **Postgres** — ends the one-file, one-disk deploy model.

## If this ever needs revisiting

The trigger would be governance becoming a *practical* problem (licensing
change, abandonment) — not the ethics page. First option to re-check:
**libSQL's cgo situation** (a pure-Go or no-cgo binding would make it a
near-drop-in). File format compatibility means migration would be low-drama.