SQLite is an incredible piece of software, and its commitment to backward compatibility is deeply admirable. But that same promise has also become a limitation.
v3.0 was first released in 2004—over 20 years ago—and the industry has changed dramatically since then.
I can’t help but wish for a “v4.0” release: one that deliberately breaks backward compatibility and outdated defaults, in order to offer a cleaner, more modern foundation.
Note: I'm not asking for new functionality per se. But just a version of SQLite that defaulted to how it should be used, deployed in 2025.
There was an attempt/experiment to develop SQLite 4: https://sqlite.org/src4/doc/trunk/www/index.wiki
The focus of that experiment was to find out of LSM-based storage[^1] would prove to be faster. It turned out that LSM, for SQLite's workloads, did not provide enough benefit to justify the upheaval.
[^1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Log-structured_merge-tree
https://turso.tech I think attracts a lot of the people trying add new features / improve SQLite rough edges