Queryable Executables

I was pleasantly surprised and happy to see that my article ‘ Your executable is a SQLite database ’ resonated with people. It is a format I have been thinking about for a while, and the idea seems to have struck a chord with others. A quick recap: SELF , a format where the program is a SQLite database. We can use binfmt_misc to trigger a custom interpreter that maps the rows in the segments table and jumps to the entry point, and a whole class of binary tooling collapses into SQL. What keeps surprising me is how having the file format be a SQLite database keeps collapsing everything into SQL. One idea that was immediately evident to myself and others through comments: If the executable is a database, and a database is something you can write to, can the running program use it to also store its state? 🤔 Yes! 🤯 We can collapse not only a complete distribution but all the state for every application into a single file, alleviating the need for /var/ or /tmp/ or /home/ or any other filesystem. The program can store its own state in the same file it is running from, and it can do so transactionally. self-httpd is a proof-of-concept webserver that does exactly that. It is a single file program executed from a database. The file contains the program, the website, the routes and all the visitor logs. All state is updated in the same SQLite file as the program itself. # Our server is a single file, and it is a SQLite database $file server server: SQLite 3.x database, application id…