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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

#561

Post by win311fwg »

self_awareness wrote: post #555
moi2388 wrote: post #541

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Patents and copyright stifles innovation. Knowledge should be communal and free.

Free and communal knowledge means you're easily replaceble by someone else. I wonder what communal answer you have for someone who would say, "moi2388, your work will be now done by moi2389. Thanks and good bye."

The alternative is that you are not easily replaceable, which means that moi2389 is the one who doesn't get to do the work. Which is good for moi2388, perhaps, but what about moi2389? Either way someone is going to be left out in the cold.

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

#562

Post by rlvk »

ak39 wrote: post #546

Is the 300x performance boost attributable to the threading model vs process model? Was the code for the threading model written by hand or was it translated from the WIP threading model the human PG team is busy with as part of the 2028 roadmap?

I'd like to know on what machine and on what testbench the supposed 300x boost is achieved so that we can independently verify it. My assembler-written fork of postgres is achieving 600x boost on SELECT 1;

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

#564

Post by wongarsu »

otterley wrote: post #433
maxloh wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IANAL, but calling this "relicensing" is technically inaccurate. It is more precise to describe it as adding constraints. When you combine your work with upstream code, you are layering additional requirements (like copyleft) onto the existing attribution requirements. The original limitations remain in effect. Therefore, it is not a shift from A to B, but rather from A to A ∪ B. This practice is entirely compatible…

IAAL (not legal advice) and I’m not sure the issue is settled. The BSD license only explicitly permits the author “to use, copy, modify, and distribute this software and its documentation for any purpose, without fee, and without a written agreement.” By default, the owner of a protected work retains all rights not conveyed to someone else. Changing the license isn’t one of the enumerated activities, and so I think t…

You are not really changing the license of the original work though. You are not impacting what the author or anyone else can do. You are distributing a copy under different, more restrictive terms.

A bit like me buying a comic book, then offering to sell it to you under the condition that you never let my brother read it and that you make any future owner agree to the same terms. That's perfectly legal, and there is no reason I would need permission from the author (or publisher) to do that

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

#565

Post by Griffinsauce »

Jean-Papoulos wrote: post #504
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 useful to show the actual team that it's possible. From there, they can make the decision of whether to go the bun route with more information.

This is true but these projects are rarely presented or interpreted as a proof of concept.

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

#566

Post by hexo »

byzantinegene wrote: post #146
josefrichter wrote: post #47

Why so much negativity? I find these projects interesting for learning purposes and exploring new ways. What’s wrong with that?

can you enlighten me, what exactly do you learn from asking a llm to do a rewrite?

well, it accelerates icebergs meltdown. so it helps...

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

#567

Post by hexo »

mahogany wrote: post #413
subarctic wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean you can learn a lot. You can learn what's possible with less effort to build a proof of concept. It's kind of like you had another engineer do it for you, you don't completely learn how to do it yourself but you can still learn a lot with much less effort

You would learn way more by asking an LLM how postgres works. Nobody is even reading this Rust code. There are 7000 commits over 2 weeks. What is being learned from that?

exactly zero knowledge gained. all former expert understanding is buried down in slop so it is inaccessible and will be completely inaccessible once slop-machine stops

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

#568

Post by BadBadJellyBean »

win311fwg wrote: post #547
72deluxe wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems to be the issue with using LLMs for any code generation. Even with my own code bases that I've written entirely by hand over years, if I use AI to implement anything, I don't go through the mental model of architecting it, so I don't know how it works. I can only imagine this to be far, far worse for large code bases maintained by a team of people who are all using AI.

That depends on the language you are using. Some language communities had already rejected "architecture astronauts" before LLMs were born, so the training data was highly consistent, which has lead to LLMs being highly consistent in their output. You know how it works because the LLM spits out the same as what you would have written yourself. It's almost eerie that they can do that. Unfortunately that doesn't apply…

One problem there is that even if the code is consistent, idiomatic Rust is not the same as idiomatic C.

So either the translation produced Rust code in the "shape" of C code or the code is quite different from the C implementation.

Add to that that you need to have people proficient in Rust and also Postgres as well as the very much unknown codebase as a whole you get a recipe for pain.

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

#569

Post by Havoc »

Did similar with S3 and that too (eventually) did well against tests (the ceph s3 ones).

...but haven't dared use it for anything meaningful yet. Still feels like there is a real world gap in confidence when it comes to vibecoded rewrites.

Been wondering whether the answer is to insert a proxy...something that effectively splits traffic to a known S3 and the rewrite and compares outcomes over time. Do that for a couple different workloads for a month or so and if it's all identical then it's probably fine...

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

#570

Post by hexo »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #140
josefrichter wrote: post #47

Why so much negativity? I find these projects interesting for learning purposes and exploring new ways. What’s wrong with that?

People feel threatened by LLMs doing things well that they feel should require their skills and talent. That's understandable but it's still a bit of a negative emotion that probably isn't very productive. Or very rational. This thread is full of people trying to argue that this can't be any good, shouldn't be any good, and is clearly going to end in tears. And obviously this thing passing tens of thousands of carefu…

I can't see the achievement here.
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