Am I the only one who thinks SQLite is still too complicated for many programs? Maybe it's just the particular type of software I normally work on, which tends towards small, self-hosted networking services[0] that would often have a single user, or maybe federated with <100 users. These programs need a small amount of state for things like tokens, users accounts, and maybe a bit of domain-specific things. This can all live in memory, but needs to be persisted to disk on writes. I've reached for SQLite several times, and always come back to just keeping a struct of hashmaps[1] in memory and dumping JSON to disk. It's worked great for my needs.

Now obviously if I wanted to scale up, at some point you would have too many users to fit in memory. But do programs at that scale actually need to exist? Why can't everyone be on a federated server with state that fits in memory/JSON? I guess that's more of a philosophical question about big tech. But I think it's interesting that most of our tech stack choices are driven by projects designed to work at a scale most of us will never need, and maybe nobody needs.

As an aside, is there something like SQLite but closer to my use cases? So I guess like the nosql version of SQLite.

[0]: https://boringproxy.io/

[1]: https://github.com/boringproxy/boringproxy/blob/master/datab...