On Sun, Jan 8, 2017 at 4:59 AM, Gavin Flower <gavinflo...@archidevsys.co.nz> wrote: >> Is this completely unrealistic or is it carved in stone PostgreSQL will >> always be a C project forever and ever? >> > From my very limited understanding, PostgreSQL is more likely to be > converted to C++!
I'm tempted to snarkily reply that we should start by finishing the conversion of PostgreSQL from LISP to C before we worry about converting it to anything else. There are various code comments that imply that it actually was LISP at one time and I can certainly believe that given our incredibly wasteful use of linked lists in so many places. gram.y asserts that this problem was fixed as far as the grammar is concerned... * AUTHOR DATE MAJOR EVENT * Andrew Yu Sept, 1994 POSTQUEL to SQL conversion * Andrew Yu Oct, 1994 lispy code conversion ...but I think it'd be fair to say that even there it was fixed only in part. 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 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. -- 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
