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0 pointsjabo3y ago0 comments

I really appreciate that you took the time to write this detailed comment! Thank you!

> but for me one example of production looks like a raspberry pi in a school house in rural africa (internet in a box project)

This is an interesting perspective, one that I hadn't considered before. You're saying that software can be run in a variety of different environments and that the definition of what a "production" environment looks like is context-dependent.

My definition of "production" in the context of server software is that you typically run this software on a server or set of servers in some datacenter (think Redis, Postgres, MySQL, MongoDB, etc). In this context, I've always defined "production-ready" as:

1. Can it withstand infrastructure failures?

2. Is the API stable?

So when I say Meilisearch is not "production-ready", it's in this specific context - it can only be run on a single node, and it cannot handle infrastructure failures natively. So it could become single point of failure.

> This here is another spot where you seem biased. Remove the "despite v1.x versioning", it comes off as petty.

Historically I've seen server software has fault tolerance built-in when they reach v1.0, and it's a common assumption that I've seen engineers make. So I wanted to call attention to it... The phrasing of it comes across as petty, now that you mention it. I'll remove that.

> I get what you're saying about "production ready" but there must be another way to word it?

I think "fault tolerance" is a better word to describe what I had in mind. I'll update this.

> I don't think either of you support https.

Typesense does support https natively.

> Do you really not recommend the use of a reverse proxy? ... I guess you're assuming it's running on a stand alone computer with a public facing IP... ? Are you not providing a frontend/dashboard?

Yes to all your questions, except that Typesense does support HTTPS natively.

> You've made this sound like a draw back, if you had of put "None. Self-contained binary" in front of it like you did for yourself that would be fine but for this you mention a feature that you have while ignoring what looks to me like the same feature in your competitor.

I was actually going to add "None. Self-contained binary" for Meilisearch. But then their docs explicitly recommend using a reverse proxy in front: https://docs.meilisearch.com/learn/cookbooks/running_product...

With Typesense, we use h2o as the http library, which for eg Fastly exposes directly to internet-bound traffic and it's specifically built for handling high-volume traffic. This is why we feel comfortable recommending not putting a reverse-proxy in front of Typesense.

> Language support... This is also a bit confusing, and I can't help but think it's probably not completely honest. What makes meilisearch different so that it doesn't support "all languages", but elasticsearch does? Meilisearch certainly claims to support all languages where words are seperated by spaces, do you support languages that don't have words separated by spaces?

Yes, we support all languages that are space-separated. We also added support for CJK languages recently (which are not space-separated). I picked the phrasing you see under the Meilisearch column, from their docs: https://docs.meilisearch.com/learn/what_is_meilisearch/langu... (it used to read slightly different previously).

> Meilisearch is multilingual, featuring optimized support for: > Any language that uses whitespace to separate words > Chinese > Japanese > Hebrew > Thai > We aim to provide global language support, and your feedback helps us move closer to that goal.

> This user claims that meilisearch has better multi-language support: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34708802

We didn't support CJK languages in a GA release, until 2 weeks ago. So they are most likely talking about an earlier version of Typesense.

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traverseda3y ago

Like I say, it's just my subjective gut reaction. I guess if there was one main take away it's "describe your competitors with the same language you'd use to describe yourself", where possible.

None, completely stand-alone with built in http(s) server | None, recommends a reverse proxy

As an example.

>So when I say Meilisearch is not "production-ready", it's in this specific context - it can only be run on a single node, and it cannot handle infrastructure failures natively. So it could become single point of failure.

And I don't really disagree with that, but it really is up to a judgement call on whoever is setting it up. If search isn't a critical feature than whoever is setting up might prefer meilisearch for it's memory model. For example I once worked on "the great canadian encyclopedia", which ran on a single VPS and needed search capability. It already had a single point of failure, so running search on the same VPS wasn't a big concern. There are also different roll-over policies, different uptime guarantees, different architectures, etc. If "production grade" was some kind of industry standard that would be one thing, but it really really does depend on the client.

I think that the single point of failure thing is a very important consideration, and should probably be in your overview along side the memory/data model, but I do honestly think typesense's memory-only disqualifies it from a lot of production systems I've worked on, and that meilisearch's single point of failure hasn't. Fault-tolerance and single point of failure deserves it's own row in your overview, it shouldn't be thrown into the use-case column.

Honestly it's only really an issue when taken all together, fix a few of those and you'll be in much better shape I think.

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