Re: Summer of Code idea

On Tue, Apr 25, 2006 at 10:30:26PM +0200, Jesper Pedersen wrote:
> Hi.
>
> I have been thinking about this for a while and now that Google Summer of Code
> is coming I thought I would share this idea.
>
> The GCC people have traded their bison/flex parser with a hand written
> recursive-descent parser for a nice speed up.

Nice? The figures I'm seeing are 2%. Is that even noticable?

> So it would be interesting to see if PostgreSQL would benefit from the same
> 'switch'.
>
> By the looks of it *) the job could be completed within the time frame and
> maybe pgbench could serve as the testing framework for the performance
> measurements.

I think it's worth a try, but you have to consider that unlike C, SQL
as a language keeps changing in ways we have no idea about yet.
Whatever the result is, it has to be more maintainable than what we
have now...

> I think it has an academic angle to it -- something fun for the student and
> maybe a speed up for PostgreSQL :)

Abosolutly. It'd be a fun experiment, if one were so inclined.

Have a nice day,
--
Martijn van Oosterhout   <kleptog@svana.org>   http://svana.org/kleptog/
> From each according to his ability. To each according to his ability to litigate.