On Tue, Jan 10, 2017 at 10:55 AM, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> Robert Haas <robertmhaas@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