Looks like an ORM? I used to use these a lot but these days I just write SQL. Far too many performance issues and fighting with a library to do what I could just write in SQL in 5 mins. Type safety doesn't really seem like a big sell here. Most SQL libs already let you "getInt()".
this post was submitted on 24 Dec 2025
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Haven't thought about but yes - it solves a few of the same problems as ORMs. Maybe the front page does not mention it, but with Lutra, you don't get result.getInt(). You get generated Python classes / Rust structs that reflect the Lutra types.
func get_album_by_id(album_id: int16): Album -> (
get_albums()
| find(func (this) -> this.id == album_id)
)
I'll admit I'm not a database guy, but isn't this inefficient? It looks like it's first querying the DB for all albums, then filtering the results in the interpreter. I assume the db engine has a more optimal implementation for when you do SELECT WHERE query, designed for whatever data structures it's using internally.
Also, minor nitpick but why does it have so many different ways to define a function body?
func something() -> { ... }
func something() -> ( ... )
func something() -> ...
Two great questions!
First one comes down to how database query optimization and predicate pushdown in particular. In this case, albums would probably have an index on albums.id column, which would optimize get_album_by_id into a single index lookup. Ideally, I would want to have an explicit function for this, something like sql::from_index("albums", "id", 3), but there is no such thing as explicit index lookup in PostgreSQL right now.
Regarding different function syntaxes:
- curly braces
{ ... }construct a new tuple (think object, struct, record), - parenthesis are used for precedence. They are not strictly needed for function bodies, but they do give a better visual guide to multi-line definitions, especially when using pipe operator.
So:
func something() -> { ... } # constructs a new tuple
func something() -> ( ... ) # returns a value
func something() -> ... # equivalent to ( ... )