<antirez>

Finally Redis 6.0.0 stable is out. This time it was a relatively short cycle between the release of the first release candidate and the final release of a stable version. It took about four months, that is not a small amount of time, but is not a lot compared to our past records :)

So the big news are the ones announced before, but with some notable changes. The old stuff are: SSL, ACLs, RESP3, Client side caching, Threaded I/O, Diskless replication on replicas, Cluster support in Redis-benchmark and improved redis-cli cluster support, Disque in beta as a module of Redis, and the Redis Cluster Proxy (now at https://github.com/RedisLabs/redis-cluster-proxy).

So it happened again, a new Redis version reached the release candidate status, and in a few months it will hit the shelves of most supermarkets. I guess this is the most “enterprise” Redis version to date, and it’s funny since I took quite some time in order to understand what “enterprise” ever meant. I think it’s word I genuinely dislike, yet it has some meaning. Redis is now everywhere, and it is still considerably able to “scale down”: you can still download it, compile it in 30 seconds, and run it without any configuration to start hacking. But being everywhere also means being in environments where things like encryption and ACLs are a must, so Redis, inevitably, and more than thanks to me, I would say, in spite of my extreme drive for simplicity, adapted.

[Note: this post no longer describes the client side implementation in the final implementation of Redis 6, that changed significantly, see https://redis.io/topics/client-side-caching]

The New York Redis day was over, I get up at the hotel at 5:30, still pretty in sync with the Italian time zone and immediately went walking on the streets of Manhattan, completely in love with the landscape and the wonderful feeling of being just a number among millions of other numbers. Yet I was thinking at the Redis 6 release with the feeling that, what was probably the most important feature at all, the new version of the Redis protocol (RESP3), was going to have a very slow adoption curve, and for good reasons: wise people avoid switching tools without very good reasons. After all why I wanted to improve the protocol so badly? For two reasons mainly, to provide clients with more semantical replies, and in order to open to new features that were hard to implement with the old protocol; one feature in particular was the most important to me: client side caching.

Months ago the maintainer of an OSS project in the sphere of system software, with quite a big and active community, wrote me an email saying that he struggles to continue maintaining his project after so many years, because of how much psychologically taxing such effort is. He was looking for advices from me, I’m not sure to be in the position of giving advices, however I told him I would write a blog post about what I think about the matter. Several weeks passed, and multiple times I started writing such post and stopped, because I didn’t had the time to process the ideas for enough time. Now I think I was able to analyze myself to find answers inside my own weakness, struggles, and desire of freedom, that inevitably invades the human minds when they do some task, that also has some negative aspect, for a prolonged amount of time. Maintaining an open source project is also a lot of joy and fun and these latest ten years of my professional life are surely memorable, even if not the absolute best (I had more fun during my startup times after all). However here I’ll focus on the negative side; simply make sure you don’t get the feeling it is just that, there is also a lot of good in it.

The new Redis data structure introduced in Redis 5 under the name of “Streams” generated quite some interest in the community. Soon or later I want to run a community survey, talking with users having production use cases, and blogging about it. Today I want to address another issue: I’m starting to suspect that many users are only thinking at Streams as a way to solve Kafka(TM)-alike use cases. Actually the data structure was designed to *also* work in the context of messaging with producers and consumers, but to think that Redis Streams are just good for that is incredibly reductive. Streaming is a terrific pattern and “mental model” that can be applied when designing systems with great success, but Redis Streams, like most Redis data structures, are more general, and can be used to model dozen of different unrelated problems. So in this blog post I’ll focus on Streams as a pure data structure, completely ignoring its blocking operations, consumer groups, and all the messaging parts.

Ten years ago Redis was announced on Hacker News, and I use this as virtual birthdate for the project, simply because it is more important when it was announced to the public than the actual date of the project first line of code (think at it conception VS actual birth in animals).  I’ll use the ten years of Redis as an excuse to release something I played a bit in the previous days, thinking to use it for the 1st April fool: but such date is far and I want to talk to you about this project now… So, happy birthday Redis! Here it’s your present: a Gopher protocol implementation.

Yesterday a concerned Redis user wrote the following on Hacker News:

— https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19204436 —
I love Redis, but I'm a bit skeptical of some of the changes that are currently in development. The respv3 protocol has some features that, while they sound neat, also could significantly complicate client library code. There's also a lot of work going into a granular acl. I can't imagine why this would be necessary, or a higher priority than other changes like multi-thread support, better persistence model, data-types, etc.

[EDIT! I'm reconsidering all this because Marc Gravell
 from Stack Overflow suggested that we could just switch protocol for backward compatibility per-connection, sending a command to enable RESP3. That means no longer need for a global configuration that switches the behavior of the server. Put in that way it is a lot more acceptable for me, and I'm reconsidering the essence of the blog post]

A few weeks after the release of Redis 5, I’m here starting to implement RESP3, and after a few days of work it feels very well to see this finally happening. RESP3 is the new client-server protocol that Redis will use starting from Redis 6. The specification at https://github.com/antirez/resp3 should explain in clear terms how this evolution of our old protocol, RESP2, should improve the Redis ecosystem. But let’s say that the most important thing is that RESP3 is more “semantic” than RESP2. For instance it has the concept of maps, sets (unordered lists of elements), attributes of the returned data, that may augment the reply with auxiliary information, and so forth. The final goal is to make new Redis clients have less work to do for us, that is, just deciding a set of fixed rules in order to convert every reply type from RESP3 to a given appropriate type of the client library programming language.

For quite some time I’ve wanted to record a new video talking about code comments for my "writing system software" series on YouTube. However, after giving it some thought, I realized that the topic was better suited for a blog post, so here we are. In this post I analyze Redis comments, trying to categorize them.  Along the way I try to show why, in my opinion, writing comments is of paramount importance in order to produce good code, that is maintainable in the long run and understandable by others and by the authors during modifications and debugging activities.

The last few days have been quite intense. One of the arguments, about the dispute related to replacing or not the words used in Redis replication with different ones, was the following: is it worthwhile to do work that does not produce any technological result?

As I was changing the Redis source code to get rid of a specific word where possible, I started to think that whatever my idea was about the work I was doing, I’m the kind of person that enjoys writing code that has no measurable technological effects. Replacing words is just annoying, even if, even there, there were a few worthwhile technological challenges. But there is some other kind of code that I believe has a quality called “hack value”. It may not solve any technological problem, yet it’s worth to write. Sometimes because the process of writing the code is, itself, rewarding. Other times because very technically advanced ideas are used to solve a not useful problem. Sometimes code is just written for artistic reasons.