Re: [HACKERS] RustgreSQL

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).
-- 
Jim Nasby, Data Architect, Blue Treble Consulting, Austin TX
Experts in Analytics, Data Architecture and PostgreSQL
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