One of the bosses working for one of our industrial partners was completely clueless about the details of the mission and the context. One day, he entered the office of one of his employees:
- Hi Bob [fake name], do you know anything about this Planck stuff?
- Sure, I'm working full time on Planck.
- Good! And do you know what WMAP is?
- Of course I do!
- Great! Now listen, if WMAP run on Windows, you should definitely install it on my computer, so I can play with it.
Do you mean that it would be impossible for a team of experts in C and rust to rewrite pg in 5 years? That is essentially what he is proposing. (Which probably isn't a great idea, but I think the work scope estimate is in the right ball park.)
Reminds me of first year CS students who after learning that assembly is lower level and can be faster than C, wanted OSes and applications to be written in assembly for speed.
I'm just asking possibly stupid questions and having possibly
stupid theories, trying to understand why such a project would
be possible or not.
Because of the interop ease, it's not hard to imagine a multi-year peicemeal rewrite. Postgres' code has some pretty good idioms that could be nicely encoded in Rust, and a good separation of concerns
Postgres has a great focus on solving real problems for real people. Losing that focus would be a disaster.
That's putting the cart before the horse. The right question is:
a) What's the argument in favor of porting Postgres to Rust?
and
b) What's the opportunity cost?
company in reference https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trustly