> Now, in my ideal world something like this could be made as an extension so that it can work on older versions and not have to be maintained by core. And likely grow more features over time. Is there anything fundamental about this that prevents it being implemented in an extension and, if so, what can we add to core in v18 to alleviate that limitation?
Like extension providing additional binary? Or what kind of extension do you mean? One of the original ideas was to be able to do so (parse query) without running postgres itself. Could extension be useful without running postgres backend?
Pushing beyond my experience level here...but yes a separately installed binary (extension is being used conceptually here, this doesn't involve "create extension") that can inspect pg_config to find out where backend/postmaster library objects are installed and link to them.
