# sandglass/sandglass

Sandglass is a distributed, horizontally scalable, persistent, time sorted message queue.

Repository: https://github.com/sandglass/sandglass
Canonical: https://ross.abutalabs.com/products/sandglass
Language: Go
License: Apache-2.0
License Family: permissive
Topics: distributed, message-queue, taskqueue, go, distributed-systems, messaging
Archived: true
Last push: 2018-08-25T20:11:00+00:00

## Health v2 (maintenance only)
Score: 10/100 (v2, computed 2026-09-03T02:20:16.233290+00:00)
- activity 0, release rhythm 8, longevity 100
- inputs: {"age_days": 3269, "days_push": 2930, "days_rel": null, "gap_med": null, "n_releases_24m": 0}
- flags: archived
- formula: round(0.45*activity + 0.35*rhythm + 0.20*longevity); archived -> min(score, 10)

## Adoption (not part of the score)
Stars 1523, forks 45 (observed 2026-08-28T04:04:58.107727+00:00)

## What it is
Sandglass is a distributed, horizontally scalable, persistent message queue that orders messages by time. It supports asynchronous task execution and message scheduling, making it usable as a task queue.

## Use cases
- run a distributed message queue with time-ordered delivery
- schedule messages to be consumed in the future
- build an asynchronous task queue with automatic redelivery
- track consumer offsets with ack/nack per message
- scale messaging horizontally across multiple nodes

## When to choose
- you need a time-sorted, persistent message queue with horizontal scalability
- you want delayed message delivery and per-message acknowledgements
- you need a language-agnostic queue with a Go client and CLI

## When to avoid
- you need a production-ready, actively maintained system - the project is an experimental prototype with no recent releases
- you need a mature ecosystem like Kafka, NATS, or RabbitMQ
- you require guaranteed long-term API stability

## Facets
- artifact type: service
- maturity: experimental
- function: message-queue, streaming, scheduling
- domain: microservices, backend
- platform: go, cross-platform
- tags: task-queue, time-ordered, horizontal-scalability, persistent-storage, message-scheduling, messaging, linux, macos, docker

## Member repositories
- sandglass/sandglass (main) score 10

## Provenance
- Observed fields: from GitHub, fetched 2026-08-28T04:04:58.107727+00:00.
- Health v2: computed from the inputs above; adoption is never an input.
- Inferred fields (summary, facets, guidance): AI-extracted, prompt v1, taxonomy v1, on 2026-08-30T04:31:45.283859+00:00, confidence not recorded.
  - readme: https://github.com/sandglass/sandglass (fetched 2026-08-28T04:04:58.107727+00:00, sha 4de41b9887a7)
- Data as of 2026-08-30T08:39:29.467469+00:00.