Re: PostgreSQL future ideas

Chris Browne wrote:
> jonah(dot)harris(at)gmail(dot)com ("Jonah H. Harris") writes:
>
>> Having done quite a bit of internals work with SAP DB (which is an
>> amalgamation of C, C++, and Pascal), I completely agree. The entire
>> system, if possible, should be in a single language.
>>
>
> Note that this actually *isn't* possible; PostgreSQL is implemented in
> a number of languages already:
> a) C, obviously
> b) m4 and some autoconf macrology
> c) GNU make
> d) There's some awk
> e) Shell script
> f) Flex
> g) Bison
>
> And I'm not sure that's all there is :-).
>

Agree on Andrew's point of "continuation of this thread is pointless" -
but not being very pointed, I'd point out that the various integrations
with PL/Perl, PL/Python, PL/Tcl, and PL/PgSQL means that PostgreSQL is
both intimate about the bindings between C and the language, and
knowledge about the languages themselves.

So, "all one language" is indeed unrealistic.

But, this thread has split. The first question was whether PostgreSQL
should be re-written in C++ or something else, where the answer seems to
be almost a universal "no". The second question is whether PostgreSQL
can be extended with pluggable languages, for which I think the answer
is already a yes. If some parts of PostgreSQL are not performance
bottlenecks, and they are extremely complicated to write in C, and very
easy to write in something else common and simple (I've never used LUA
myself?), I imagine it would be acceptable to the community.

Cheers,
mark

--
Mark Mielke <mark(at)mielke(dot)cc>