On 2024-06-11 Tu 19:48, Noah Misch wrote:
On Mon, Jun 10, 2024 at 06:49:11PM -0700, Andres Freund wrote:
On 2024-06-10 16:46:56 -0400, Andrew Dunstan wrote:
On 2024-06-10 Mo 16:04, Andres Freund wrote:
Just for context for the rest the email: I think we desperately need to move
off perl for tests. The infrastructure around our testing is basically
unmaintained and just about nobody that started doing dev stuff in the last 10
years learned perl.
As for what up and coming developers learn, they mostly don't learn C
either, and that's far more critical to what we do.
C is a a lot more useful to to them than perl. And it's actually far more
widely known these days than perl.
If we're going to test in a non-Perl language, I'd pick C over Python. There
would be several other unlikely-community-choice languages I'd pick over
Python (C#, Java, C++). We'd need a library like today's Perl
PostgreSQL::Test to make C-language tests nice, but the same would apply to
any new language.
Indeed. We've invested quite a lot of effort on that infrastructure. I
guess people can learn from what we've done so a second language might
be easier to support.
(Java would be my pick from your unlikely set, but I can see the
attraction of Python.)
I also want the initial scope to be the new language coexisting with the
existing Perl tests. If a bulk translation ever happens, it should happen
long after the debut of the new framework. That said, I don't much trust a
human-written bulk language translation to go through without some tests
accidentally ceasing to test what they test in Perl today.
+1
cheers
andrew
--
Andrew Dunstan
EDB: https://www.enterprisedb.com
