That's an interesting thought. I wonder.

I wonder if the following things make the C driven version slower...

- prepare the send buffers (sqlite side)

- prepare the receive buffers (go side)

- do the call

- get the received data into go buffers of some kind

- free up the send buffers (happens automatically)

- free up the receive buffers (semi automatically in Go).

When using stdin/stdout, the system looks after send/receive buffers. It's simply reading/writing them. No allocation is needed. The stream can be as big or as little as wanted/needed. The OS will look after the integrity of the streams and these are probably fairly well tested subsystems on most operating systems.

stdin/stdout becomes a "library" for "fast data transfer".

Pretty neat.

fwiw, the tailscale fork of Crawshaw’s library has a good number of allocation removals and other optimizations, but cgo is still expensive.