On Tue, Jan 10, 2017 at 12:24 PM, Joshua D. Drake <jd@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