On Tue, Jan 10, 2017 at 12:24 PM, Joshua D. Drake <j...@commandprompt.com> wrote: > In human terms, C is the only one of these that has been around long enough > to realize it isn't a teenager (or child really), and although you may still > be able to do the things you could in your 20s, you are going to pay for > them the next day.
On aging, tell me about it. On language selection, if I were working at Google, I'd be fine with doing my next project in Go, because if Go goes away, then either Google will pay me or someone else to rewrite all of my code, or they'll be the ones to suffer the fallout of telling me to write in Go in the first place. Either way, no problem. If I were working at a a startup that will either fail or go public within 5 years, Go would be fine for that, too. If Google stops supporting it, by the time they'd be likely to make any decisions that would adversely affect the company, I'd be either rich or employed elsewhere. But if I were starting a database project that I hoped or expected to last another 20 years, I'm not sure I'd want to be tied to a language with less than 10 years of history. We've often talked about the value of having a PostgreSQL community which is not controlled by any one company. We'd lose that at least some of that value if our entire code base were written in a language controlled by one company. C is boring, but it's not going away. It's also extremely fast and resource-efficient, and it's got a big, rich ecosystem of tools and libraries around it. There are all sorts of things that are best written in some other language, but for system software it's hard to beat. -- 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