On Tue, Jan 10, 2017 at 10:55 AM, Tom Lane <t...@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote: > Robert Haas <robertmh...@gmail.com> writes: >> I'm not meaning to be funny or sarcastic or disrespectful when I say >> that I think C is the best possible language for PostgreSQL. It works >> great, and we've got a ton of investment in making it work. > > Yeah. There's certainly a whole lot of path dependency in that statement > --- if you were starting to write Postgres from scratch today, you would > very likely choose some other language. But given where we are, there's > just not a lot of attraction in trying to convert to another language.
Really? What language would you pick in a vacuum? The Linux kernel is written in C, too, for pretty much the same reasons: it's the canonical language for system software. I don't deny that there may be some newer languages out which could theoretically be used and work well, but do any of them really have a development community and user base around them that is robust enough that we'd want to be downstream of it? C has its annoyances, but its sheer pervasiveness is an extremely appealing feature. -- 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
