Re: RustgreSQL

Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>

From: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
To: Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com>
Cc: Jan de Visser <jan@de-visser.net>, "pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org" <pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org>, Joel Jacobson <joel@trustly.com>, Craig Ringer <craig@2ndquadrant.com>, Jim Nasby <Jim.Nasby@bluetreble.com>, Gavin Flower <GavinFlower@archidevsys.co.nz>
Date: 2017-01-10T15:55:15Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers
Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> writes:
> I'm not meaning to be funny or sarcastic or disrespectful when I say
> that I think C is the best possible language for PostgreSQL.  It works
> great, and we've got a ton of investment in making it work.

Yeah.  There's certainly a whole lot of path dependency in that statement
--- if you were starting to write Postgres from scratch today, you would
very likely choose some other language.  But given where we are, there's
just not a lot of attraction in trying to convert to another language.

As other people noted, the one path that might possibly make sense is
a gradual upgrade to C++.  But getting past the exceptions issue is a
pretty high bar that we'd have to clear before we could do much in
that direction; and it's not obvious that C++ would offer enough benefit
to be worth it.  Most of us would rather spend our time on new features
or performance improvements, not fighting with a language changeover.

			regards, tom lane