I'm thinking of using it to replace an analytics pipeline at my job, which now uses expensive batch jobs. If the tech is solid, we would have instant and incremental updates, instead of recomputing everything every X hours. This would simplify things a lot.

I think Materialize offers a similar product, but last I checked it was only available as a SaaS solution.

I hope to do a proof of concept soon, to compare both solutions

materialize now offers a self managed version of the product https://materialize.com/docs/self-managed/v25.1/

Does anyone have experience with RisingWave in production? It seems like an interesting product but I can't find any experience reports.

I've been running this in prod self hosted for around 6 months (podman with docker compose, minio for s3, streaming with pulsar). We have built position calculations for risk monitoring and booking enrichment pipelines. Risingwave is a much better alternative to Kafka Streams: primarily around consistency, sql first, easy state query and deployment.

The RisingWave team are pretty responsive on slack and the ask ai feature also helps to solve questions. They have coverage from Singapore, China and California.

Issues we have seen have mostly been related to reliability of our on prem Minio cluster which is used to store the data. Other bugs do appear from release to release but once raised get attention quickly.

I was going to go with Redpanda+Flink, would you suggest otherwise? (and why)

Looking at the contributor list, I doubt they speak English or frequent HN so you’ll only get the engineers’ perspective. Looks new and the cloud offering a way to sell it.

A. Some of the team members are in the bay area including the founder who writes well. B. Used it for streaming sql on citus cluster and planning to use it more.

A) I assumed the team members were English speaking and are amazing at what they do (look at it!), more that they might have more customers on the eastern side of the world and that’s totally my bias from past B) but glad to see I’m wrong and that there’s people using it for things. It looks awesome.

Alex Chi was in the project. He is now writing TinyLLM.

Oh I wasn’t talking about the engineers behind the project, they’re good. More if there were companies using this already…

Don’t take it the wrong way, just that the east and west tend to only share things when it’s profound - like deepseek.

But I could be wrong, sometimes things go under the radar until it’s ready.

User name almost checks out

Classic Dutch: “We need this talent… but financially, it is impossible to support them,”

you get runtime errors with a long JVM stacktrace

If the core team had ever addressed the decade of surveys showing that error messages/stacktraces were people's top complaints, you wouldn't need Claude.

Immutability removes so much accidental complexity, it makes whole classes of mistakes dissapear. I'd also take immutability over types.

Clojure sort of guides you to simplicity, building everything out of functions and simple datastructures has big advantages when testing and reasoning about code.

I do find that in larger code bases, Clojure lack of types causes friction (spec is just a bandaid, not a fix).

There are languages with immutability and types (like Haskell), but these don't have the get-shit-done factor I seek.

Seems like a bunch of go programmers really wanted to use go, no matter how impractical.

Interesting! I did an internship where I tried to use transducers for fast information extraction. In theory, you can use FST's for fast approximate parsing. I didn't really work out, but I had lots of fun implementing a libary to compose FST's and explore cool algorithms to compose them. Not much business value was delivered, but I learned a lot.

This year I switched to a new job, using programming languages that I was less familiar with.

Asking a LLM to translate between languages works really well most of the time. It's also a great way to learn which libraries are the standard solution for a language. It really accelerated my learning process.

Sure, there is the occasional too literal translation or hallucination, but I found this useful enough.

Have you noticed any difference in picking up the language(s) yourself? As in, do you think you'd be more fluent in it by now without all the help? Or perhaps less? Genuine question.

I do tons of TypeScript in my side projects and in real life, and I usually feel heavy frustrations when I stray away.

When I stray out of this (e.g. I started doing a lot of IoT, ML and Robotics projects, where I can't always use TypeScript). I think one key thing that LLMs have helped me is that I can ask why something is X without having to worry about sounding stupid or annoying.

So I think it has enabled me at least a way to get out of the TypeScript zone more worry free without losing productivity. And I do think I learn a lot, although I'm relating a lot of it on my JS/TS heavy experience.

To me the ability to ask stupid questions without fear of judgment or accidentally offending someone - it's just amazing.

I used to overthink a lot before LLMs, but they have helped me with that aspect, I think a lot.

I sometimes think that no one except LLMs would have the patience for me if I didn't filter my thoughts always.

Well said. CharGPT is almost the opposite of stackoverflow -- you can ask a stupid question, and ask why a language is designed in such a way, and get nice, patient, nuanced answer without judgment or starting a war.

And how much can you trust those replies?

At least 80% of the time.

I have brains and can verify if it's correct or not.

about as much as I trust StackOverflow answers

For me it just speeds up learning the language, so I think i'd become fluent faster.

I do thoroughly review of the the LLM answers, and hardly every directly copy paste answer, so I feel this way I still learn the language.