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Postgres rewritten in Rust, now passing 100% of the Postgres regression tests
131–140 of 756 posts
Re: Postgres rewritten in Rust, now passing 100% of the Postgres regression tests
#132I am not trolling, but I have a simple question: Why? Why do I use this instead of the official build? What is the business case?
It's pure virtue signaling.
Re: Postgres rewritten in Rust, now passing 100% of the Postgres regression tests
#133Why 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.
Often the biggest blocker on moving to a new programming language, is the cost of re-writing everything. Cue some story here on a bank or airline somewhere still relying on cobol backend servers. These LLM conversions really seem to make modernization of large parts software layers possible!
I have some familiarity with the bank situation, and while a lot of them are on some very old systems (maybe COBOL, maybe something else, either way they want off it) the cost of actually re-writing the code is far from the most significant issue.
Consider: You have a big mainframe running your tier 1 bank. Assume that you can see all the code on it, and you can feed all that to an LLM if you like. Getting it to spit out a Rust version is not what you actually want - you now have a modern language but it's still a singleton instance, so where do you run it? Most hardware doesn't give you enough uptime for what you need here, because what you actually needed was a re-architecture for distribution / failover / whatever, and while you could ask your LLM to do that you aren't going to run your bank on the result.
Re: Postgres rewritten in Rust, now passing 100% of the Postgres regression tests
#134Why 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?
It's pretty ergonomic to agents. Like typescript.
Re: Postgres rewritten in Rust, now passing 100% of the Postgres regression tests
#135How 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…
Vibe code was never meant to be reviewed. These rewrites are just test-driven development taken to the absolute extreme. Created under the hope that the existing tests are exhaustive and cover every relevant use case, such that if they all pass, the rewrite must be at least as good as the original. So just go with the vibes and burn tokens until they pass, and your job is done. In practice, this is never true for any…
> reality doesn't seem to be an obstacle for vibe
Went straight into my vault of brilliant quotes!
Re: Postgres rewritten in Rust, now passing 100% of the Postgres regression tests
#136> The goal is to make Postgres easier to change from the inside uh-huh, sure. you want to show off "look what the LLM can do / look what I burned a bunch of tokens on"? you want to brag about how your LLM-generated slop is somehow more maintainable than the original because blah blah blah Rust? here [0] is the version history of Postgres. pick a version from the past. let's say 14.x because it's the most current that…
It's not just unsafe, it's this:
let r = unsafe { &*p };
Re: Postgres rewritten in Rust, now passing 100% of the Postgres regression tests
#137Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because it’s uncomfortable to see decades of work copied so trivially.
But that's the thing, without the decades of work, it wouldn't BE trivial. Everyone is standing on the shoulders of those which came before. If LLMs allow us to combine the incredible decades of effort and knowledge and experiences that's gone into building something as great as Postgres, and take that and combine the experience and philosophy that has led to the creation of a language that potentially provides tangi…
But who is getting celebrated? The people who spent a lot of time on the original thing, or the AI rewrite that everyone now uses?
Re: Postgres rewritten in Rust, now passing 100% of the Postgres regression tests
#138How is the performance compared to regular PostgreSQL? I know it says it is not performance optimized yet, but if this succeeds, will it only bring more "memory safety" or is there a serious performance gain as well?
will it only bring more "memory safety" or is there a serious performance gain as well? The project will die in a couple of days or weeks. You're making a mistake if you're seriously consider using this in any capacity.
Maybe it will, but having a performance comparison will be very interesting nontheless.
Re: Postgres rewritten in Rust, now passing 100% of the Postgres regression tests
#139What 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...
I would expect Postgres to be heavily tested with things like Valgrind and various sanitizers. I'd be surprised if there were low-hanging fruit. But also, if there is code that does something fishy with pointers, wouldn't the AI likely paper over it by adding an unsafe block in the Rust version, preserving the same fishiness? It's hard to know how hard it would try to prove that the original is broken.
Re: Postgres rewritten in Rust, now passing 100% of the Postgres regression tests
#140Why 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 carefully curated tests that accumulated over decades suggests otherwise. It's hard to argue against that.
This probably is going to have some new issues. But it's an impressive achievement.