Welcome back to the 70s! Jokes aside I think there are use cases for this style of memory allocation even today (embedded systems for example). I just have never felt its need in a DB (or rather, I have many more desiderata from a DB than "I don't have to worry about OOM").
Good to be back—Joran from the TigerBeetle team here!
Static allocation does make for some extremely hard guarantees on p100 latency. For example, for a batch of 8191 queries, the performance plot is like Y=10ms, i.e. a flat line.
And memory doesn't increase as throughput increases—it's just another flat line.
I personally find it also to be a fun way of coding, everything is explicit and limits are well-defined.
