On Monday, January 9, 2017 7:39:49 PM EST Joel Jacobson wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 9, 2017 at 6:03 PM, Craig Ringer <craig@2ndquadrant.com> wrote:
> > Immutable functions can and do use functionality from all over the
> > server. They just don't depend on user-visible mutable _state_
> > elsewhere in the server.
>
> OK, fair point, but at least the functionality *could* be written without
> using existing C functions, since its only the input that determine what
> output will be returned. The dependencies used by the immutable
> functions can also be ported, function by function, until there are
> no dependencies.
Be that as it may, I don't think you have convinced anybody that that is
something worth doing. The fact it *could* be done doesn't mean it *should* be
done.
You're proposing to introduce a metric eff-ton of instability in a project
that routinely spends ten-message email threads discussing changing an elog to
ereport.
To give you some perspective: *everybody* agrees autotools (the mechanism used
to generate makefiles) is aweful. Everybody. About a year ago somebody showed
saying "Hey, I have a draft patch replacing autotools with cmake". Cmake is
infinitely better (mostly because it was developed in this century as opposed
to the early 80s, and so is more in tune with current toolchains). Yury has
been working on it for a year now, and I personally don't think it's going to
land in version 10. And this is "just" the make infrastructure.
What you are proposing is not going to happen unless you get some serious buy-
in from a significant number of veteran contributors. And those are exactly the
people that say "C? What's the problem?"