Date: Tue, 16 Aug 2016 18:39:40 +0300
From: Aleksander Alekseev <a.alekseev@postgrespro.ru>
To: Jim Nasby <Jim.Nasby@BlueTreble.com>
Cc: Gavin Flower <GavinFlower@archidevsys.co.nz>, dandl <david@andl.org>,
 'Adam Brusselback' <adambrusselback@gmail.com>, 'Joy Arulraj'
 <jarulraj@cs.cmu.edu>, 'kang joni' <kangjoni76@gmail.com>, 'Dmitry
 Igrishin' <dmitigr@gmail.com>, Pg Hackers <pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org>,
 Peter Eisentraut <peter_e@gmx.net>
Subject: Re: [GENERAL] C++ port of Postgres
Message-ID: <20160816183940.4818d854@e733>
In-Reply-To: <f7682c24-4271-1ff5-d963-053ecb0fce40@BlueTreble.com>
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Well, well, well. Another C vs C++ holly war, really?

> > In both cases, part of the motivation to change from C was to
> > appeal to new developers - from what I remember of the
> > discussions.  
> 
> Moving this to -hackers. Original thread at [1].
> 
> tl;dr: A C++ port of Postgres has been created, and several folks on 
> general have commented that this makes it easier to work with the 
> Postgres codebase. This potentially attracts more developers to the 
> project. I hope we can find a way to pull these folks into the fold.

Who are these "folks"? How many more developers it would attract
_exactly_, not potentially?

> People in core have complained that we don't have enough hackers
> coming in (which I agree with). Part of that is lack of familiarity
> with C.

One again, which "people"? I've seen people complained that there is
not enough code reviewers and testers. I doubt very much its something
C++ will help with.

> I think we can all agree that a C++ fork of Postgres would be a huge 
> waste of time, so the question becomes should core postgres start 
> supporting C++.
> 
> Peter wrote a blog about this in 2013 that makes some good arguments 
> [2]; in particular "easing into" this by first officially supporting
> C++ compilation. I also like the idea of investigating Rust.

And I wrote a blog post (in Russian) [1] in 2016 why nobody should (if
they can) write a new code in C++. In my opinion Rust looks way more
promising. However I personally prefer to wait like 5 years before
using a new and shiny technology. This is also something I blogged
about (in Russian [2], translation [3]).

> I realize there's little technical reason why we *need* C++ support.

You are right, there is none.

> The level if discipline applied to our codebase negates some of the
> benefits of C++. But maintaining the discipline takes a lot of time
> and effort, and makes it more difficult to attract new contributors.

There are companies. They hire developers who write code. Doesn't
really matters in which language.

Long story short - I strongly believe you are trying to solve a problem
that doesn't exist. And probably create a few new ones.

[1] http://eax.me/c-vs-cpp/
[2] http://eax.me/cpp-will-never-die/
[3] http://www.viva64.com/en/b/0324/

-- 
Best regards,
Aleksander Alekseev


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