On Tue, Aug 16, 2016 at 10:47 AM, Jim Nasby <jim.na...@bluetreble.com> wrote: > On 8/16/16 2:52 AM, Gavin Flower wrote: >> In both cases, part of the motivation to change from C was to appeal to >> new developers - from what I remember of the discussions. > > Moving this to -hackers. Original thread at [1]. > > tl;dr: A C++ port of Postgres has been created, and several folks on general > have commented that this makes it easier to work with the Postgres codebase. > This potentially attracts more developers to the project. I hope we can find > a way to pull these folks into the fold. > > People in core have complained that we don't have enough hackers coming in > (which I agree with). Part of that is lack of familiarity with C. > > I think we can all agree that a C++ fork of Postgres would be a huge waste > of time, so the question becomes should core postgres start supporting C++. > > Peter wrote a blog about this in 2013 that makes some good arguments [2]; in > particular "easing into" this by first officially supporting C++ > compilation. I also like the idea of investigating Rust.
I'm not really interested in supporting PostgreSQL code written in other languages entirely, such as Rust, but I do think it would make sense to write our code so that it can be compiled using either a C compiler or a C++ compiler. Even if we don't ever use any C++ code in core, this would let people who create forks or extensions use it if they wished. It wouldn't be that much work to maintain, either: we'd just set up some buildfarm members that compiled using C++ and when they turned red, we'd go fix it. I agree with your statement that one of our biggest problems is getting more developers interested in working on PostgreSQL. Even if there's only a 10% chance that something like this will help, why not? We're not talking about moving the earth. -- Robert Haas EnterpriseDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com The Enterprise PostgreSQL Company -- Sent via pgsql-hackers mailing list (pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org) To make changes to your subscription: http://www.postgresql.org/mailpref/pgsql-hackers