Live data from Hacker News

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

github.com

751–756 of 756 posts

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

#751
post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes most people are not top tier devs and most code is slop whether written by AI or not. I've probably dug through tens of thousands of code bases in my over 30 year career as a software engineer and most are slop. I also did not claim that all "top tier devs" would always produce better code with AI, but the qualification for a "top tier dev" in this case would be someone who verifies code multiple ways to make sur…

You've dug through tens of thousands of code bases? 30 years would give you ~10,950 days, so you'd have to be digging into 2 code bases per day, every single day without any breaks for 30 years straight, to get to "tens of thousands". When I read things like this it makes it very hard to give any credence to the rest of your pro-AI arguments, because it just seems incredibly likely that you're a bullshitter.

Yes, roughly. I try out open source projects as a hobby and a vocation. I've looked at dozens in a day sometimes. It doesn't take more than a few minutes to figure out if the code is slop.

BTW, I'm not alone in my opinion on AI:

https://www.reddit.com/r/LocalLLaMA/comments/1uxbrw4/linus_t...

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

#752

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If it's a choice between performance and being able to "safely" run sketchy extensions, I'd rather have performance.

Especially since all those sketchy extensions can be rewritten in rust over a weekend and have their bugs fixed as well.

This is just not true. PGRX can't physically support expanded shared memory due to Rust being very strict with custom allocators. A lot of shady extensions rely on dynamically allocated memory and C++ is like the only possible choice there.

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

#753

Hey author here. Wasn't expecting to see this up. To concisely give an overview of the project, I've been experimenting with using LLMs to build a better version of Postgres. Postgres is 30 years old and we've learned a lot about databases since hten. A lot of the techniques that work for doing a rewrite are also useful for doing a rearchitecture. I'm now working on a new, not yet published version of pgrust that inc…

Would you like to submit to ClickBench? I can also do it if you would prefer...

https://github.com/ClickHouse/ClickBench/pull/983

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

#754
post #740

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s 2026, so another basic technique that every team should add to their testing strategy (in addition to proven techniques like fuzzing) is agentic user simulation. Set up an AI agent with access to the product, and prompt it to use the thing in hundreds of realistic use cases, and to report any possible bugs. It will catch a lot of ‘blind spot’ bugs that were previously things that were only caught by humans.

Debug yourself of the AI hype^. Besides config, SQL implementations have a very limited textual API surface of accepting queries. Putting whole layers of UI and agents around it is really inefficient way of finding edge cases. I wouldn't call that basic, nor the most comprehensive option. Fuzzing at the query layer is far more computationally efficient and effective . A truly stochastic method is more likely to hit a…

you don't have to compare whether stochastic fuzzing or agentic testing is the best. You can just do both of them. They both have enough ROI to be worth the trouble. That's why I said "in addition to".

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

#755
post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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!

> the biggest blocker on moving to a new programming language, is the cost of re-writing everything In 2026, not sure if it was satire. Do some people truly believe that all their software stack has to be single tech, from device drivers to end user apps? Does that extend to remotely accessed services?

It’s still a thing in big corps. We have all business nanoservices (I can’t call them micro) at JVM (moving to Kotlin from Java) and any try using Go is silently killed by those JVM talibans.

I wonder if no one really thought there about rewrite that will still connect with all old dependencies with old protocols, but also will expose new kind of API that can be used by next rewritten block.

We also had mainframe, we used Oracle. It turned out that casual server is also reliable in long term and we restarted them only for upgrades of OS. Of course moving to some distributed, fault tolerant option also feels like good direction, but instead not-doing the perfect rewrite at once you can do it two/three step migration. Costs nowadays? You already fixed that.

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

#756

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…

Very intriguing. I write C++ which definitely isn't considered beginner-friendly. Yet because of the large amount of code a LLM can churn out, I mentally don't recall what it does, like making a working car but no idea of how the engine works. Perhaps I need to spend more time reading its code output, but then I might as well write it myself...
Post reply on HN