Launched this week
SpacetimeDB
Development at the speed of light.
60 followers
Development at the speed of light.
60 followers
SpacetimeDB is a real-time backend framework and database for apps and games. It replaces both your server and database. SpacetimeDB 2.0 brings first class support for web development.
Hey everyone! I'm Tyler, one of the founders of Clockwork Labs and creators of SpacetimeDB!
Today we're announcing that SpacetimeDB is coming to web apps with the release of SpacetimeDB 2.0!
SpacetimeDB was originally born out of necessity. We developed SpacetimeDB in order to build our MMORPG, BitCraft Online. When starting development on the game, we realized that there was no software that would allow us to build our game's server-side logic in a way that was simple, transactional, and real-time. All existing solutions to the problem required that you build a complex distributed system to synchronize ephemeral server state and persistent database state, quickly exploding the complexity.
Our background is in distributed systems and large scale data platforms and data processing. We decided to solve the problem once and for all by developing a new kind of backend platform focused on transactional ACID semantics and extreme high performance.
Today BitCraft is shipping on Steam and all logic runs through SpacetimeDB, from chat to the real-time player movement.
In developing SpacetimeDB, we quickly realized that this problem is not unique to MMOs or even games. It's also incredible for bringing high performance real-time to apps and web apps.
There is far too much time spent on things that have nothing to do with your product. Stitching APIs to databases. Managing caches and message queues. Writing boilerplate synchronization logic. Waiting on slow deploy cycles just to test simple changes. Entire teams end up focused on infrastructure glue instead of gameplay, collaboration, or core features.
We believe backend development should feel more like writing application logic, not plumbing.
With SpacetimeDB, you write your backend as a single, authoritative, real-time program. Your data model, business logic, and synchronization live together, expressed directly in code. Clients subscribe to the data they care about, and SpacetimeDB keeps them in sync automatically.
Instead of gluing together a database, API server, and pub/sub system, SpacetimeDB combines them all in a single system.
SpacetimeDB ships with:
- Support for TypeScript/JavaScript, C#, Rust, and C++ modules
- Support for React, Vue, Angular, Unity, Unreal, and more
- Built-in realtime data subscriptions
- Strongly typed schemas and APIs generated from your data model
- Server-authoritative logic using reducers and transactions
- High performance ACID transactional capabilities
- Support for the Postgres Wire Format
- Deterministic execution for correctness and reproducibility
- A generous free tier and slick dashboards at spacetimedb.com
We would love to hear your thoughts and feedback as we continue to build and ship SpacetimeDB!
I've been experimenting with SpacetimeDB, it's very promising. I haven't done any heavy development with it yet, but have done some basic prototyping. The recent web bindings are exciting, with some limitations, I am exploring the use of Spacetime as a full backend replacement for traditional web apps. Rather than a stack like Supabase plus NextJS, trying things like SpacetimeDB + Svelte. Initial attempts are promising!
Interesting architecture here.
From the description it feels like SpacetimeDB behaves closer to an application runtime platform rather than just a database or backend framework.
Curious how the team internally thinks about that distinction.
I love what you guys are doing!
One question: will it be possible to migrate data for schema changes at some point?
Love SpacetimeDB! my hope is to get a Europe location, and a possibility to have a sort of Views with parameters.