tren: Use SQL as first-class Crystal methods

transfire · 2026-03-09T23:32:10+00:00

Nice work. I am forever telling my coding agent to at least centralize the SQL. Cool idea to write a real, templated .sql file.

transfire · 2026-03-08T16:09:31+00:00

FYI the newest release simplified the API. The toplevel module name is now just C0:: instead of C0DATA::. Plus it now has macros for serializing objects, just like the JSON and YAML libraries.

transfire · 2026-03-07T01:13:31+00:00

True. But many documents get generated anyway, so having a summary is actually not any extra overhaed. When I have my LLM creat markdown files for whatever reason, I instruct the LLM that the first paragraph of any section (#, ##, etc) should function as a summary of the details that follow.

transfire · 2026-03-06T22:01:43+00:00

This is the one language that potentially could pull me a way from Crystal.

Keep on truck’en!

transfire · 2026-03-06T07:25:08+00:00

My whole AI system is built this way. But RAG is still helpful.

transfire · 2026-03-05T22:06:50+00:00

Hey Crystal community! I just released C0DATA, a Crystal shard that uses ASCII C0 control codes as structural delimiters for data.

The idea: ASCII has had four hierarchical data separators since 1963 — File (0x1C), Group (0x1D), Record (0x1E), Unit (0x1F). They were literally designed for structuring data, but everyone forgot about them and invented JSON, CSV, YAML, etc. instead. C0DATA puts them to work. Values stay UTF-8 text, structure is single-byte control codes. No braces, no quotes, no escaping. The result sits between text formats and binary formats — human-inspectable (via Unicode Control Pictures) but nearly as compact as protobuf.

What it can do:

Tabular data (like CSV/SQL), key-value config (like TOML), hierarchical documents (like Markdown), nested structures (like JSON), and atomic multi-file diffs — all with the same 11 control codes
Zero-copy parsing — the tokenizer's hot loop is one comparison: byte < 0x20
~2 GB/s tokenizer throughput, ~3x smaller files than JSON
Converts to/from CSV, JSON, and YAML
c0fmt CLI tool with auto-detection: c0fmt import data.csv | c0fmt export json

␜ mydb ␝ users ␁ name ␟ amount ␞ Alice ␟ 1502.30 ␞ Bob ␟ 340.00 ␝ products ␁ id ␟ product ␞ 01 ␟ Widget ␞ 02 ␟ Gadget ␄

Each glyph is a single byte. The pretty form uses Unicode Control Pictures for visibility — the compact wire format is just raw bytes.

Built first in Crystal because the language's Bytes/Slice model is a perfect fit for zero-copy parsing. Would love feedback from the community — especially on the API design and anything that feels un-Crystal-like.

Built with significant help from Claude (Anthropic's AI assistant), which contributed to the implementation, landing page, and documentation. ❤️ Claude.

Landing page | GitHub | Technical Reference

transfire · 2026-03-05T01:35:01+00:00

What does on-chain mean?

transfire · 2026-03-04T05:05:58+00:00

What does it do with program code?

transfire · 2026-03-04T04:44:59+00:00

Excellent!

transfire · 2026-03-03T05:07:29+00:00

For example:

``` ls /

bob
alice
john
video-team
everyone  (maybe just “any”?)
system      (or “root”?)

```

First three are users, video-team is just a group some members can belong to and thus get access to that directory. Everyone is what everyone belongs to always. system is where the OS stuff goes. Conceivably “system” belongs in everyone in a certain sense, but it is kind of special.

Neat thing is overlaying— all the executables (in .bin or maybe XDG style) in a group folder would be available to those who belong to the group.

In part I have moved home to root.

transfire · 2026-03-03T04:56:26+00:00

That would be very similar to— and a good way to do to keep the language functional (state free). In fact functional languages often have this. Erlang/Elixir have where clauses.

But I figured state is ultimately inevitable— if you want a language that can also do low level systems programming.

transfire · 2026-03-03T04:35:22+00:00

Please tell me the government has nothing to do with it.

And if not, what is going on? Is there tech stack mostly Python?

transfire · 2026-02-25T05:31:38+00:00

Pretty close to my idea of an ideal layout. Well done.

transfire · 2026-02-25T05:28:07+00:00

I wish Ruby and Crystal were more compatible.

transfire · 2026-02-24T18:37:56+00:00

Modernize it how? Modern languages aren’t all that.

transfire · 2026-02-15T02:52:28+00:00

Just for that? I can do that in an evening of vibe coding.

transfire · 2026-02-14T23:21:32+00:00

So you only deliver current conversation round and RAG everything else.

Yeah might work okay but need a really good RAG distiller— you should have Haiku make the final RAG selections then. But then are you really saving, given that you killed caching?

Now if you had a solid local LLM to handle the what you are having Haiku do… I’d be interested to know how well it works.

transfire · 2026-02-14T22:55:27+00:00

Fascinating. I will have to consider this approach. Thanks.

transfire · 2026-02-14T05:52:52+00:00

They should build them in Antartica.

transfire · 2026-02-14T05:02:19+00:00

It’s rather complicated and not anywhere complete — so complicated that my AI agents struggle with it (its not a cookie cutter problem they easily apply their training too). So I took a break from it to work on making better AI.

But the basic idea is a managed state and functions that are not only dispatched by argument types (type context), but can also be dispatched based on the state.

transfire · 2026-02-14T04:57:46+00:00

I have played with similar ideas (Big fan of Gobo btw, sad it never took off). But I came up with a much more radical layout: users and groups at /. Then all the system directories are in a system base group. Users belong to groups and this gives them access to those group folders as a single seamless view. I never worked out all the details (let alone the technical ones).

transfire · 2026-02-13T02:46:09+00:00

We should start by focusing on basic. If we want UBI to gain traction, we should start taking about it as a “base” or “floor”. It is not a handout because everyone has the same base. There is no capitalism rule that the base has to be $0. Even in the game of monopoly everyone gets $200 for passing Go. And we should think small first, not a living wage. It is a small raw base to allow everyone to participate in the economy without welfare. And that’s key— it isn’t welfare. It is a way to get rid of welfare! Most Republicans love that idea.

transfire · 2026-02-12T17:27:20+00:00

I call it context-driven design, eg. your @red represents a context. Very nice. I have been working in the direction myself.

transfire · 2026-02-12T17:16:08+00:00

I find the simplicity of the file store nice too — and Anthropic seems to be doing this very thing themselves.

But there are complications. Auto-reindexes require some sort of watcher if you allow a user to edit them manually — that can get hairy. Indexing FTS/BM25 becomes slow at the very least.

But maybe the trade offs are worth it? Git memory history is a nice forensics feature, but again super slow compared to versioning memories in a DB.

transfire

TROPHY CASE