HackerReposA FIELD GUIDE TO OPEN SOURCE
ProSponsor the shelf♧ 0
← Back to top all-time
rust-lang
datafrog
Rust2019–2026
rust-lang / datafrog

datafrog

A lightweight Datalog engine in Rust

8Distinct people
9Mentions
0Explicit recommenders
911GitHub stars
REPOSITORY AT A GLANCE

What to know before exploring

What it is

A lightweight Datalog engine in Rust

GitHub

Where it is used

No documented product use has been verified yet.

What people are saying

No recommendation phrase was found in the indexed comments.

No classified warning is attached to this page. Read the discussions before treating silence as approval.

Also in these discussions

Mentioned in the same Hacker News threads. That is not proof they are substitutes.

This week on Hacker News

Nov 7–Nov 14 UTC · Direct repository links and separately labeled related project stories. Indexed through 11/14/2026, 12:54:37 PM UTC.

No direct repository links were found in the indexed HN discussions over the past seven days. Older discussions are available below.

Mentions over time

HN mentions by year9 dated mentions

Observed mentions: 2019-03-11 00:45:13 UTC to 2026-01-07 16:10:44 UTC.

012342019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments20192020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 2 mentions; 0 submissions, 2 comments2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 4 mentions; 1 submissions, 3 comments20222023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 0 mentions; 0 submissions, 0 comments2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC to 2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC (exclusive): 1 mentions; 0 submissions, 1 comments. Incomplete calendar period.2026*

* An incomplete calendar period is marked with an outlined bar. Its count is not directly comparable with a full period.

Counts come from the repository’s dated source evidence. Index cutoff: 2026-11-02 08:16:59 UTC.

View mention counts and date ranges
UTC ranges include their start and exclude their end. Select a period to filter the source evidence.
PeriodStart (UTC)End (exclusive, UTC)MentionsSubmissionsComments
20192019-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20202020-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20212021-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC202
20222022-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC413
20232023-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20242024-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
20252025-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC000
2026 (partial)2026-01-01 00:00:00 UTC2027-01-01 00:00:00 UTC101

What Hacker News says

9 sources
Funny you say that, the Rust borrow checker tried to adopt differential-dataflow directly - the library behind this language - but Frank McSherry told them it's too complicated, let me build you an easier-to-use Datalog instead [blog]. So he built [datafrog] which is at the heart of the borrow checker today. I'm not sure what the delta between Salsa and differential-dataflow is. My experience with differential-dataflow is that it's also galaxy brain. [blog]: https://github.com/frankmcsherry/blog/blob/master/posts/2018... [datafrog]: https://github.com/rust-lang/datafrog
In Differential Datalog: a programming language for incremental computation
C++ is arguably the most complex programming language ever. There is not much to be gained by comparing against the supremum. Take a look at the languages that rust was influenced by (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rust_(programming_language)) those aren't languages with straightforward compilation semantics. There is a reason why rust has a datalog engine build into the compiler (https://github.com/rust-lang/datafrog). Which is imho totally rad and awesome, but really hard to fully form a mental model of without a spec.
In MiniRust
They used to but Frank McSherry (author of differential dataflow) wrote them a specialized version without all the dataflow infrastructure [1]. It's part of the rust-lang nursery [2] now but hasn't been updated in a while, so I'm not sure what happened to it. Edit: Looks like the rustc_mir crate that implements the non-lexical borrow checker uses `polonius_engine` [3] which uses `datafrog` so it's still used by the compiler! [1] https://github.com/frankmcsherry/blog/blob/master/posts/2018... [2] https://github.com/rust-lang/datafrog [3] https://crates.io/crates/polonius-engine
In Differential Dataflow for Mere Mortals
Moar links! (caveat: I am involved in many things) 1. You can implement some minor flavor of Doop in differential dataflow (https://github.com/TimelyDataflow/differential-dataflow/tree...). The fragment came from Yannis which he described as a minimal non-trivial analysis (vs other, even smaller fragments), but it still uses some 900 dataflow operators (updates in 10s of ms when inputs change, though). The DD impl isn't meant to be understood, I'm afraid. 2. Many ex-LB folks are now at relational.ai doing .. advanced weird tech like they did with LB. I'd watch them (I do). 3. Polonius (https://github.com/rust-lang/polonius) defines the Rust borrow checker as Datalog rules, and went from differential dataflow to datafrog (https://github.com/rust-lang/datafrog). 4. If you want to check out other incremental Datalog environments, in addition
Read the rest
In The Essence of Datalog (2018)

MAKE YOURSELF AT HOME

A few shortcuts

/
Search the collection
?
Open this guide
Esc
Close dialogs and navigation

Your saved repositories and interests stay in this browser.