On 1/9/17 11:51 AM, Robert Haas wrote:
Anyway, with regards to either Rust (which I know very little about) or C++ (which I know more about) I think it would be more promising to think about enabling extensions to be written in such languages than to think about converting the entire source base. A system like
Yeah, converting the entire codebase is probably doomed to failure from the start.
PostgreSQL is almost a language of its own; we don't really code for PostgreSQL in C, but in "PG-C". Learning the PG-specific idioms is arguably more work than learning C itself, and that would still be true, I think, if we had a "PG-C++" or a "PG-Rust" or a "PG-D" variant. Still, if having such variants drew more programmers to work on extending PostgreSQL, I think that would be worth some work on our part to enable it. However, maintaining multiple copies of our 1.2-million-line source base just for easier reference by people more familiar with one of those languages than with C sounds to me like it would create more problems than it would solve.
I do wonder if there are parts of the codebase that would be much better suited to a language other than C, and could reasonably be ported. Especially if that could be done in such a way that the net result is still C code so we're not adding dependencies to non developers (similar to bison).
Extensions are a step in that direction, but they're ultimately not core Postgres (which is a different issue).
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