Re: PostgreSQL future ideas

Robert Haas wrote:
> > C isn't going anywhere anytime soon.  Look at its history, it has survived
> > its 'replacements' over and over again.  The most popular kernels, shells
> > and applications are all still written in C (new and old).  Where are the
> > warning signs that it is dwindling?
> 
> To add to this:
> 
> It's easy to underestimate the effect that writing in almost anything
> else has on performance.  I once had a job working on a research
> operating system written in C++.  It was about 10x slower than
> whichever flavor of BSD we were using at the time.  There were a lot
> of reasons for this, but I remember that overuse of heavy-weight
> template classes was definitely one of them (not to mention a huge
> source of code bloat).  Ripping that logic out and replacing it with
> something more, erm, C-like paid huge dividends.
> 
> There's no problem with using a higher-level language for your
> application programming - I do almost all of my coding these days in
> Perl or, as it happens, PL/pgsql.   But you really don't want that
> programming language to itself be written in another high-level
> language.  Core system components like your kernel and database and
> compiler need to be fast, and it's pretty hard to get that in anything
> other than C.  You could probably make C++ do the job passably well,
> but only if you avoid using some of the more inefficient language
> features... in other words, only if you make it look as much like C as
> possible.

Agreed.  If we went with C++ we would need to be able to turn _off_ some
C++ features to keep performance reasonable.  I can see trying to use a
_few_ C++ features, but in general it isn't worth the effort.

--  Bruce Momjian  <bruce@momjian.us>        http://momjian.us EnterpriseDB
http://enterprisedb.com
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