I think we will actually see some successful projects coming out of this. There are definitely people who want x old project in this new/better programming language and who are willing to put effort into maintaining it not just doing one off port.
Postgres rewritten in Rust, now passing 100% of the Postgres regression tests
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Re: Postgres rewritten in Rust, now passing 100% of the Postgres regression tests
#22I feel like we need to heavily differentiate between a rewrite and an AI rewrite.
Is there any measurable difference in quality between the two, or are you just going on "vibes"? Is there a correlation between the quality of the manually written code and AI generated code driven by the same dev? Such crude takes only cause unnecessary friction. If you have a black box that spits out code, and you are unable to distinguish the quality between a top tier dev and an AI inside the black box, then the…
Didn't the initial rewrite of Bun into Rust have an ocean of "unsafe" in it, and wasn't it entirely dysfunctional?
Re: Postgres rewritten in Rust, now passing 100% of the Postgres regression tests
#23I feel like we need to heavily differentiate between a rewrite and an AI rewrite.
Is there any measurable difference in quality between the two, or are you just going on "vibes"? Is there a correlation between the quality of the manually written code and AI generated code driven by the same dev? Such crude takes only cause unnecessary friction. If you have a black box that spits out code, and you are unable to distinguish the quality between a top tier dev and an AI inside the black box, then the…
> Is there a correlation between the quality of the manually written code and AI generated code driven by the same dev?
If the dev doesn't vet the code, it doesn't matter how good quality a dev they would be if they wrote the code - they didn't. Sure, the dev would probably drive the initial architecture discussion better and some people are using AI in small batches with tests and vetting everything, but some previously great devs are throwing in PRs that touch hundreds of files at once with one commit.
A lot of people I previously considered great developers have become people I would not recommend for a job in the past 2-3 years.
> If you have a black box that spits out code, and you are unable to distinguish the quality between a top tier dev and an AI inside the black box, then the distinction is unnecessary.
Sure, but this is just begging the question. If nobody could tell, the term 'slop' wouldn't have become so popular.
Re: Postgres rewritten in Rust, now passing 100% of the Postgres regression tests
#24I start to see a lot of these re-writes that depend on tests to state that its working. But the things that make software like Postgres and SQLite reliable are not mostly the test, but the real world production scars. That's where the reliability comes from, years and years of running in production.
> not mostly the test, but the real world production scars Most extensive test suites are exactly production scars: every time you have a bug or a regression, you write a test that confirms correct behaviour. SQLite is a good example to bring up because its extensive closed-source tests are what’s often cited as being what keeps people from forking it. (Turso did it, though, but it takes a company to deliver some gua…
The maintainers that wrote those tests will have experience you won't get out of a rewrite.
I think this is also where the real work is. A rewrite is one thing, that you can show off with a flashy blogpost. The maintenance, for years to come, won't be of that nature yet it still requires as much work.
Re: Postgres rewritten in Rust, now passing 100% of the Postgres regression tests
#25I feel like we need to heavily differentiate between a rewrite and an AI rewrite.
Not sure it’s so simple. I think close to 100% of new ambitious projects are going to leverage AI at least to some degree. I know a couple that have strict no-AI policies (e.g. Zig), but it’s a tiny minority i think. So how much AI usage does it make it an “AI rewrite”?
When the majority of the code is written by AI, it is more than 50%.
Re: Postgres rewritten in Rust, now passing 100% of the Postgres regression tests
#26What would be interesting is if they found a memory unsafe bug. Postgres is a perfect case study of 30 years of C with a bit of CPP; if rewriting in a safer language didn't find anything...
Re: Postgres rewritten in Rust, now passing 100% of the Postgres regression tests
#27The great Jarred Sumner pulled it off with bun, whether it can be pulled of with Postgres is an open question..
DST systems such as Antithesis can definitely help.
Re: Postgres rewritten in Rust, now passing 100% of the Postgres regression tests
#28Woah! AGPL? That's interesting. I think Postgres has shown an open source SQL server didn't need a copy-left license to develop sustainably, so I'm not entirely aure about that, but I do like the license in general.
When the software consists entirely of ~$1000 worth of Claude credits and ~40 hours of developer time prompting and curating it, literally what does it matter what license the resulting 100k LoC artifact is provided under? Copyleft and the whole software licensing ecosystem only matter when producing that software actually requires serious human effort and dedication.
Also can the code even be copyrighted?
For my machine translation of SQLite to Go I added this to the README as to licencing:
Most of the code here is machine translated using wasm2go. As such, the original authors retain copyright and the original licenses remain in effect. Everything else is licensed under MIT-0.
The translator (wasm2go) has a licence chosen by, and a copyright notice from, me. Makes no sense for the translated code.
Re: Postgres rewritten in Rust, now passing 100% of the Postgres regression tests
#29Now which one is safer? A new Postgres written in Rust, or the original real world tested Postgres?
Re: Postgres rewritten in Rust, now passing 100% of the Postgres regression tests
#30Does it support the extension ecosystem? Or would extensions need to be rewritten as well?
They would need rewriting (a few are included)