Warp; sqlite-xsv; WASM in 2023

Today, we take a look at three, lacking a better word, “technologies” that have been covered in previous drops to see what they’ve brought to the table for 2023.

Warp

Warp [GH] — a fresh take on the beloved terminal — was in one of the earliest drops, and keen-eyed readers noticed I didn’t mention it in my recent post that included what tech I’m leaning on to do daily work.

I was (and still am) a massive fan of Warp. It truly does re-imagine how we humans interact with a terminal interface. It is as much a breath of fresh air to the CLI as the Arc browser is to the web. (Speaking of which, here’s another invite link that expires after five folks use it).

When I poke at new tech, I (usually) stick it on the home “lab” network, which is configured to capture all network traffic passively.

Now, “cloud” functionality is part of Warp’s feature set, and one of the cooler aspects of Warp is the ability to share terminal output via HTTP with just a tap. There are other components that require Warp to make API calls to deliver other functionality. But, you can use it “locally” just fine if you don’t need the features that require internet access (a terminal — even a re-imagined one — is fairly useless if it requires public internet access to function).

I stopped using Warp in a professional context since I had no real idea what it was doing during all non-user-initiated “phone home” network interactions. The fancy name for this is “telemetry”, and plenty of programs we use collect telemetry. Good ones default to “opt-out” mode and explain what the telemetry is for. Taking a chance that Warp would log all terminal keystrokes in these non-initiated network interactions was not on the menu. Since I wasn’t able to use Warp for both work and “play”, it had to be set aside.

This week brought some welcome Warp news: telemetry is now optional. Their blog post is an easy read, so I’ll let you poke at it to help you decide if Warp might be something you are willing to put into your daily arsenal. It’s still closed-source (they do discuss their FOSS strategy quite a bit in their FAQ). Until one can run their own complete (client + server) Warp environment with visibility into the source, I still can’t justify the potential loss of confidentiality in a work context. Tailscale managed to figure this out, so I hope Warp does, too.

sqlite-xsv

Longtime readers will know how much these Drops 💙 SQLite. A big reason for this 💙 is that SQLite supports extensions, so you get to add functionality without bloating up the core framework.

SQLite-xsv is “the fastest CSV SQLite extension, written in Rust”, and it:

• enables querying of CSVs, TSVs, and other-SVs as SQLite virtual tables

• provides a “reader” interface that lets folks query CSVs from other data sources, such as sqlite-http

• has built-in support for querying CSVs with gzip or zstd compression

You can learn more about it in this Observable notebook, which also includes some benchmarks. As the author notes, “sqlite-xsv is not a silver bullet. For analytical queries on CSV files (GROUP BYs, ORDER BYs, etc.), then new-age data tools like DuckDB and DataFusion outperform by a large margin”.

Still, this is a pretty cool/useful extension that is already part of this year’s personal toolkit.

WASM in 2023

Frank Denis did a phenomenal job taking a look at (including benchmarks) WASM runtimes in 2023. So much so, that any commentary I add would be narcissistic hubris on my part. If you’re WASM-curious, it’s worth the time to read.

FIN

The Warp devs did more than introduce some pro-privacy options into their flagship product this week. They also went on a deep dive into “what happens when you open a terminal and enter ls”. It’s the “terminal” equivalent of “what happens when your browser makes a web request” and a fun/informative read. ☮