What Does the "GR" in GRDB Stand For?

[flowtoolz]

Please make it easier for me and other people who discover GRDB to immediately "get it" i.e. click with it 😉

[groue]

Hello @flowtoolz!

I'm afraid those are... my initials, for Gwendal Roué!

For the archeologists who stumble on this page, I can give more details:

My first public open source library was a Mustache templating engine, written in pre-ARC (!) Objective-C, so I needed a prefix, and I lazily picked GR: GRMustache (like NSString or UIView).

Then I wanted to start something with SQLite and Swift, for my coworkers and I. At that time¹ the very popular SQLite wrapper was the Objective-C FMDB. I wanted to help the transition from FMDB to GRDB, to make the life of FMDB users easy. So I grabbed many names from this library. For example, the DatabaseQueue and Database types are direct ports from FMDB. Even today, seven years later, you can ignore the fancy SQL builder, the record protocols, and just enjoy raw SQL with FMDB-like apis.

GRDB is a tribute to FMDB ❤️

Footnotes

1. FMDB is still popular. For example, the excellent RSS reader NetNewsWire uses FMDB today. ↩

[flowtoolz]

Thanks for the quick response! 🙏🏻

Maybe the name should be addressed up front, since it's cryptic to newcomers and not just because it's interesting to archeologists 😁

I know this thought comes about 5400 GitHub stars too late, but let me share it: I think a more catchy, expressive and inclusive/universal name would boost conversion/adoption even more. I didn't immediately realize GRDB is about databases. It looks like an acronym, similar to GDPR, and the "DB" part could stand out more. I believe people would fall in love with GRDB easier if it was called SwiftDB or something like that. But maybe that's just my personal aesthetic sensibility.

[groue]

Yes, I have thought about renaming the project on a few occasions, and make it more catchy.

Now, as you say, one does not throw away 5K stars and a reputation built over years in a whim. Also there exists tweets, blog posts, StackOverflow answers, Reddit comments, and generally online content and urls that I can not change, are indexed by Google, and are useful for library users.

For better of for worse, the library started as a personal project, with an old-fashioned name, and semi-private cryptic references to almost forgotten software. It is still, today, tied to my name, and did not turn into a community project that could be named on its own.