On 2024-06-17 Mo 4:27 AM, Matthias van de Meent wrote:
> Hi Greg, Jelte,
>
> On Sat, 15 Jun 2024 at 23:53, Greg Sabino Mullane <htamfids@gmail.com>
> wrote:
>
> > Those young-uns are also the same group who hold their nose when
> coding in C, and are always clamoring for rewriting Postgres in Rust.
>
> Could you point me to one occasion I have 'always' clamored for this,
> or any of "those young-uns" in the community? I may not be a huge fan
> of C, but rewriting PostgreSQL in [other language] is not on the list
> of things I'm clamoring for. I may have given off-hand mentions that
> [other language] would've helped in certain cases, sure, but I'd
> hardly call that clamoring.
>
>
Greg was being a but jocular here. I didn't take him seriously. But
there's maybe a better case to make the point he was making. Back in the
dark ages we used a source code control system called CVS. It's quite
unlike git and has a great many limitations and uglinesses, and there
was some pressure for us to move off it. If we had done so when it was
first suggested, we would probably have moved to using Subversion, which
is rather like CVS with many of the warts knocked off. Before long, some
distributed systems like Mercurial and git came along, and we, like most
of the world, chose git. Thus by waiting and not immediately doing what
was suggested we got a better solution. Moving twice would have been ...
painful.
I have written Python in the past. Not a huge amount, but it doesn't
feel like a foreign country to me, just the next town over instead of my
immediate neighbourhood. We even have a python script in the buildfarm
server code (not written by me). I'm sure if we started writing tests in
Python I would adjust. But I think we need to know what the advantages
are, beyond simple language preference. And to get to an equivalent
place for Python that we are at with perl will involve some work.
cheers
andrew
--
Andrew Dunstan
EDB: https://www.enterprisedb.com
