On Sun, Jan 8, 2017 at 1:51 PM, Jan de Visser <jan@de-visser.net> wrote:
> And this is where I think you're wrong, and why conversion would be hard. C
> has very few complicated details. I don't think it has any, frankly. It
> basically says "If you want your datastructure to outlive a function call,
> I'll give you a chunk of memory and you're now responsible for it. Have fun".
> That's not complicated: it's two functions, malloc() and free(), basically.
I don't think that that is true in practice. This paper summarizes why
this is the case: https://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~pes20/cerberus/pldi16.pdf
At the same time, I don't think it would be a good idea to adopt Rust
for Postgres development, and not purely because of our legacy (it
might be interesting as a language for extensions, however). The
contradictory goals of C are what results in the kind of ambiguity
that that paper goes into. C may have contradictory goals, but that
doesn't mean they're the wrong goals, even when considered as a whole.
The culture that C is steeped in still makes a lot of sense for a
system like Postgres.
--
Peter Geoghegan
