Discussion

The Problem That Built an Industry

paulnpace: > It...handles 50,000 transactions per second with sub-100ms latency on hardware that costs a fraction of an equivalent cloud footprint. It has been doing this for 60 years.Eat that, Bitcoin.

buckle8017: Ah yes a completely centralized system that scales, who would have thought.(For the pedantic, it's not exactly centralized nor federated since each airline treats their view of the world as absolutely correct)

bombcar: 50,000 transactions a second is a bunch for humans.It’s nothing for even an ancient CPU - let alone our modern marvels that make a Cray 1 cry.The key is an extremely well-thought and tested design.

StilesCrisis: "The key insight is [...]. No daemons. No background threads. No connection state persisted in memory between transactions."Closed the tab.

arrsingh: Interesting to note right at the start of the article that they sat on a plane next to each other in 1953 but the formal partnership between AA and IBM was not till 1959 - 6 years later! The article makes it look like all this happened magically fast but in reality a reminder that things take time!>> is almost mythological. In 1953, C.R. Smith, president of American Airlines, was seated next to R. Blair Smith, an IBM salesman, on a cross-country flight. By the time they landed, the outline of a solution had been sketched. IBM and American Airlines entered a formal development partnership in 1959.edit: oh and then the actual system didn't actually go live another 5 years later - in 1964. Over a decade after the two of them sat next to each other.Reminder to myself when my potential customers don't sign the deal 5 minutes after my pitch!

cr125rider: Can you add RSS to your site? I’d love to follow but can’t.

cr125rider: Can you explain why that’s wrong?

defen: It's the LLM-generated-text signature.

neilv: ITA Software integrated with the mainframe network, and was acquired by Google.An exec made a public quote that they couldn't have done it if they hadn't used Lisp.(Today, the programming language landscape is somewhat more powerful. Rust got some metaprogramming features informed by Lisps, for example, and the team might've been able to slog through that.)

zer00eyz: SABRE, is a reminder that things that are well designed just work.How many banks and ERP's, how many accounting systems are still running COBOL scripts? (A lot).Think about modern web infrastructure and how we deploy...cpu -> hypervisor -> vm -> container -> run time -> library code -> your codeDo we really need to stack all these turtles (abstractions) just to get instructions to a CPU?Every one of those layers has offshoots to other abstractions, tools and functionality that only adds to the complexity and convolution. Languages like Rust and Go compiling down to an executable are a step, revisiting how we deploy (the container layer) is probably on the table next... The use case for "serverless" is there (and edge compute), but the costs are still backwards because the software hasn't caught up yet.

outside1234: It is interesting to think how AI will potentially change the dynamics back to this from general purpose software.In a world where implementation is free, will we see a return to built for purpose systems like this where we define the inputs and outputs desired and AI builds it from the ground up, completely for purpose?

DanielVZ: I was thinking the same sans AI. What other industries require low latency high throughput transactions that haven’t been served yet?

01HNNWZ0MV43FF: Library code - This is necessary because some things are best done correctly, just once, and then reused. I am not going to write my own date/time handling code. Or crypto. Or image codecs.Run time - This makes development faster. Python, Lua, and Node.js projects can typically test out small changes locally faster than Rust and C++ can recompile. (I say this as a pro Rust user - The link step is so damned slow.)Container - This gives you a virtual instance of "apt-get". System package managers can't change, so we abstract over them and reuse working code to fit a new need. I am this very second building something in Docker that would trash my host system if I tried to install the dependencies. It's software that worked great on Ubuntu 22.04, but now I'm on Debian from 2026. Here I am reusing code that works, right?VM - Containers aren't a security sandbox. VMs allow multiple tenants to share hardware with relative safety. I didn't panic when the Spectre hacks came out - The cloud hosts handled it at their level. Without VMs, everyone would have to run their own dedicated hardware? Would I be buying a dedicated CPU core for my proof-of-concept app? VMs are the software equivalent of the electrical grid - Instead of everyone over-provisioning with the biggest generator they might ever need, everyone shares every power station. When a transmission line drops, the lights flicker and stay on. It's awe-inspiring once you realize how much work goes into, and how much convenience comes out of, that half-second blip when you _almost_ lose power but don't.Hypervisor - A hypervisor just manages the VMs, right?Come on. Don't walk gaily up to fences. Most of it's here for a reason.

throwup238: > Reminder to myself when my potential customers don't sign the deal 5 minutes after my pitch!The classic "the decision makers can take longer to buy than you can stay solvent" problem of enterprise sales.

andersmurphy: I mean you can easily do 100K TPS on a M1 with sqlite and a dynamic language. With sub 100ms latency.People don't do it because it's not fashionable (the cool kids are all on AWS with hundreds of containers, hosting thousands micro services, because that's web scale).

arter45: Well, transactions in this context are business transactions, which may involve 1 or N remote calls. Imagine checks against no fly lists, fraud detection, flight de lata and so on. Speed of light is also another concern. So it’s not as simple as doing 35k TPS on a local SQL database.But yes, you don’t always need cool technologies.

zellyn: I was so sad when Google shelved their Sabre replacement. Could have run the whole industry.