> 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. ...Robert -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers