I feel like we need to heavily differentiate between a rewrite and an AI rewrite.
For instance, the TypeScript rewrite in Go was done mostly by humans and took a year before it was released. That is how you rewrite software that people can trust.
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
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
LLMs learn a distribution during pre-training, not only an average. Then, by giving them context or by post-training, you can make them sample non-average parts of the distribution they learned.
> Then, by giving them context or by post-training, you can make them sample non-average parts of the distribution they learned. How do you derive that something is "below average" or "average" or "above average"?
Well, it’s up to the user or post-trainer of the LLM what they believe to be above average. Then they can design around that.
In the case of real world LLMs and post-training, what is above average is defined roughly as: labeled good by expert humans, and scoring high on RL environments related to coding like debugging, passing tests, or running efficiently and verifiably correctly.
Re: Postgres rewritten in Rust, now passing 100% of the Postgres regression tests
#123Why should a developer use this for anything beyond a pet project? Just because it is written in Rust? All these "rewritten in rust" projects only reinforce the idea that a significant part of the rust community consists of software talibans and not of engineers who must deliver something that works and is reliable over time.
> software talibans I will note that, very funny
Yeah I'm using that one.
We have a problem with software religious fundamentalists in our organisation and it's an apt description.
Re: Postgres rewritten in Rust, now passing 100% of the Postgres regression tests
#124Why should a developer use this for anything beyond a pet project? Just because it is written in Rust? All these "rewritten in rust" projects only reinforce the idea that a significant part of the rust community consists of software talibans and not of engineers who must deliver something that works and is reliable over time.
> significant part of the rust community consists of software talibans
I seriously don't get it though. Rust is a nice language, but so is X. However we don't see X people brigading existing projects with constant bombardment with "rewritten in X". What is that about Rust that prompts this behavior?
Re: Postgres rewritten in Rust, now passing 100% of the Postgres regression tests
#125Re: Postgres rewritten in Rust, now passing 100% of the Postgres regression tests
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
One issue is those are the bugs you get when you write it in C++. They aren't the bugs you get when you write it in Rust. The kind of bugs you get are usually a function of the problem, language, implementation approach.
So you get other bugs when rewriting in another language without existing tests, got it. This is why I hate all the announcements of "it is rewritten in rust so it is obviously better than the original since it passes all the tests". Edit: and it's an LLM rewrite. Add that to the pile of over hyped messaging.
Unfortunately, too many people are getting captured by marketing and are divorcing themselves from reality. A rewrite can be an improvement, even if in the same or any other language.
But, there are also levels, in terms of quality and human code review, when dealing with rewrites. New bugs can be introduced or there can be style issues, that can take time to fully reveal themselves, and particularly if the person or people involved are not familiar with the other language.
Re: Postgres rewritten in Rust, now passing 100% of the Postgres regression tests
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am concerned about the quality. Even a cursory skim of the code makes the code appear asinine. Unless the genius aspects of the code elude me. https://github.com/malisper/pgrust/blob/3646a73515a5e4ac7d0b... https://github.com/malisper/pgrust/blob/3646a73515a5e4ac7d0b...
Yeah same. The structure makes no real sense and when digging into the code it reads like I'm the first human to look at it.
That's how Ai generated code is. I am almost convinced that Models are intentionally taught to write obtuse code because AI companies don't want us to write code at all
Re: Postgres rewritten in Rust, now passing 100% of the Postgres regression tests
#128How would one go about reviewing a piece of code like this? One of the things I'd typically do is peek at the commit history. Seeing what people worked on and how they did it tends to say a lot about a project. But with LLMs generating 7101 commits in less than a month that isn't feasible. Even looking at a single day is way too much [1]. It probably also doesn't make sense since the commits content won't tell you mu…
> How would one go about reviewing a piece of code like this?
That's a wrong question. The right question is "why would one go about rewriting a piece of code in X". Once and if you find a good answer to that question, you will see the answer to your's.
Re: Postgres rewritten in Rust, now passing 100% of the Postgres regression tests
#129I feel like we need to heavily differentiate between a rewrite and an AI rewrite.
We already have a well established term for AI rewrites.
Re: Postgres rewritten in Rust, now passing 100% of the Postgres regression tests
#130Rust is a stripper