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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

#351

Post by cyphar »

pyrolistical wrote: post #256
sdevonoes wrote: post #251

Don’t understand these rewrites. - typically they are behind a single person. That’s usually bad because of spf - typically they are achieved in a very short amount of time, so the author hasn’t acquired any discipline in creating the project. That means it’s unlikely the author is going to stick to the project in the mid and long term - anyone that wants to contribute to the project needs to pay. Needs to pay tokens…

It’s open source. You take ownership of it for your deployment and stop relying on continued free work. You can use llm to pull in updates as they are released. It’s not gpl, so you don’t need to publish your port

1. Nobody, not even the Googles or NSAs of the world do that. No single entity has the expertise nor resources necessary to maintain a fork for every open source project they use -- forking and maintaining Linux alone takes teams of people. And no, going full psychosis mode with LLMs is not going to save you.

2. This project is AGPLv3.

Re: Postgres rewritten in Rust, now passing 100% of the Postgres regression tests

#352

Post by password4321 »

Jepsen or GTFO.

These days there's little chance for a new DB to build its community using network effect. If you want this to catch on, switch to manually grinding community building ASAP gold plating the experience for a specific niche (AI can guide your priorities but will hinder your comms). Otherwise, have fun building!

Re: Postgres rewritten in Rust, now passing 100% of the Postgres regression tests

#353

Post by estebank »

nicce wrote: post #88
sshine wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> 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. If you can be 100% guaranteed that there indeed is a test for every occurred bug. Sometimes maintainers are not so strict about it. And some programmers are so good that some issues are self-explanatory and they write good code to note a thing but don't write a test,…

> And some programmers are so good that some issues are self-explanatory and they write good code to note a thing but don't write a test, because implementing the test is more expensive.

You don't write a test (just) to verify that your change fixed the issue, but to ensure it doesn't regress in the future after an unrelated refactor.

Re: Postgres rewritten in Rust, now passing 100% of the Postgres regression tests

#354

Post by dupontcyborg »

jeltz wrote: post #323
malisper wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Threads does not offer any major performance advantage This is very not true. When it comes to parallel queries, a process model adds a ton of overhead. You can't pass pointers between processes because the address space is different. This adds a ton of overhead in a bunch of different places. For example when doing a parallel hash join, Postgres will have each worker build a local hash table. Then it will take all…

Ok ... you know PostgreSQL supports hash tables in shared memory, right? PostgreSQL could in theory share those if we wanted to. The issue is just that coding anything which uses shared memory is a lot of work. Additionally the reasons PostgreSQL does not offer Clickhouse performance has very little to do with parallelism. PostgreSQL plans to move to threading but the efforts around imporving OLAP performance are alm…

i may be missing context, but shared memory across processes, without ipc?

Re: Postgres rewritten in Rust, now passing 100% of the Postgres regression tests

#355

Post by ferrouswheel »

dcrazy wrote: post #315
wrs wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some of this post reminds me of a story I heard long ago from someone who had worked at a HW/SW company. They’d transferred an engineer from the ASIC design team to the OS kernel team, though he’d never been on a software team before. After a while the manager called him in for the following conversation: Manager: You’re doing amazing work — zero bugs in production! I’d like you to mentor the other SWEs on how to get…

Hardware engineers call them errata ;-)

How many engineers does it take to fix a bug?

Hardware Engineers: "None. We'll fix it in firmware."

Firmware Engineers: "None. We'll fix it in software."

Software Engineers: "None. We'll document it in the manual."

Technical Writers: "None. The user can figure it out." etc.

Re: Postgres rewritten in Rust, now passing 100% of the Postgres regression tests

#356

Post by ____tom____ »

LastTrain wrote: post #271
vintagedave wrote: post #195

This is impressive - but is a license change, from the PostgresQL license [0] to AGPL [1]. I like the AGPL and think it's the best truly free open source license, but I worry if this is compatible. Ie, if this is rewritten from the original source, should the original apply? (Yes.) There has been a trend to rewrite open source software with a more restrictive license (like coretools in Rust). This looks considerably…

If you don’t like the license just let an LLM spend a few days “porting” it and give that port any license you like because that is apparently what we do now.

Yeah. I'm gonna have an LLM rewrite Star Wars and then film it. Should be fine, right?

Re: Postgres rewritten in Rust, now passing 100% of the Postgres regression tests

#357

Post by pezezin »

pessimizer wrote: post #329
melodyogonna wrote: post #115

Rust and its ecosystem needs to become more original. There are so many new problems that needs software solutions. Existing solutions that already work don't have to be rewritten in Rust.

A lot of it is actually GPL-washing and rust is the excuse. I'm on the rewrite it in rust bandwagon, but I secretly want to rewrite things in rust so they can be refactored and made easier to maintain and add features. So "rewrite it in rust" is just like "rewriting it in anything that I'm currently enamored with," and doing it with an LLM (defactoring?) would miss the point for me. rust being safe(r) just makes the…

A lot of the software being rewritten in Rust is not GPL to begin with, like PostgreSQL here which has its own BSD/MIT-like license: https://www.postgresql.org/about/licence/

Re: Postgres rewritten in Rust, now passing 100% of the Postgres regression tests

#358

Post by deadbabe »

____tom____ wrote: post #356
LastTrain wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don’t like the license just let an LLM spend a few days “porting” it and give that port any license you like because that is apparently what we do now.

Yeah. I'm gonna have an LLM rewrite Star Wars and then film it. Should be fine, right?

Star Wars itself is a rewrite of King Arthur stuff so go right the fuck ahead.

Re: Postgres rewritten in Rust, now passing 100% of the Postgres regression tests

#359

Post by Giefo6ah »

dupontcyborg wrote: post #354
jeltz wrote: post #323

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ok ... you know PostgreSQL supports hash tables in shared memory, right? PostgreSQL could in theory share those if we wanted to. The issue is just that coding anything which uses shared memory is a lot of work. Additionally the reasons PostgreSQL does not offer Clickhouse performance has very little to do with parallelism. PostgreSQL plans to move to threading but the efforts around imporving OLAP performance are alm…

i may be missing context, but shared memory across processes, without ipc?

There's nothing special about threads vs processes in Linux. mmap works the same, the challenge is to map the same file. You can share a path, pass a file descriptor via fork or unix domain socket, among other techniques.

Re: Postgres rewritten in Rust, now passing 100% of the Postgres regression tests

#360

Post by processunknown »

____tom____ wrote: post #356
LastTrain wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don’t like the license just let an LLM spend a few days “porting” it and give that port any license you like because that is apparently what we do now.

Yeah. I'm gonna have an LLM rewrite Star Wars and then film it. Should be fine, right?

LGTM. copyright laws don't matter anymore.
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