They are in extremely short supply right now.
It’s a mix of serious-wanna be, quasi religious, quasi-technical people running the show right now.
I am so happy to I got to read about the 90s-2000s tech culture, and experienced the post-2008 startup culture.
Just about 10 years ago people were really serious, but chill-looking. Somehow that got flipped.
Seems like this is delivering business value.
It’s clear seeing your post here a couple days later what’s going on. It’s deliberate. I can only speculate on their reasons why but it seems to be an intentional form of disrespect on the engineering culture. “Your norms, your work, your principles” mean nothing. We can spend money and invalidate your life’s work. We don’t need your consent or support. That’s my personal guess at a surface level.
Sorry, but I'm calling bullshit. I know there's no absolute smoking gun here, but it's all a bit too cute to be unintentional. They are very very smart people. They knew what they were doing.
Wow, so you can't even find circumferential evidence of circumferential evidence? I guess you can believe whatever you want, evidence be damned
A full rewrite in different language that fails to be idiomatic is a step backward operationally, even if you stand to gain on issues the new language just eats for free
Evidence: see the amount of nonsense in the postgres rewritten in Rust story - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48841676 where there are two contradictory claims made:
"postgres is so stable I will never trust a rewrite."
"covering 100% of postgres regression suite doesn't guarantee you have replicated every behavior."
Folks who are okay with LLMs think the regression test suite is the spec and is the guarantee of stability. How else can it be? If you are depending on some behavior not covered in the regression tests, how do you know the next minor release won't break you?
Folks who are against seem to imagine a platonic ideal of PG which conveniently is the original PG implementation by tautological definition. So no rewrite can ever meet their bar.
I think this deserves a real response.
First, an analogy. I drive along a cliff with no guardrail. How do I not drive off the cliff? By knowing how to drive. Sometimes people mess up and drive off the cliff
In practice people are operating Postgres as a machine, more than an abstract spec. Minor releases exist, but the changes are made by people operating the machine and who have a fear of making the machine break.
There are also performance characteristics that are part of an informal spec. While you can definitely write regression tests on performance, theres loads of value in stability of internals because people who have problems look into the machine and discuss it.
The internals might change, but there’s a lot of friction. So… you can have a lot of informal knowledge about.
If everyone working on a software stack is bathing in this informal knowledge, then the decision making is based on that. Things like what is meant to be in a minor or major release is understood. And people make those judgement calls.
After all, even if you have regression tests if you’re making changes you’ll need to write new tests! How do you know your new tests are right? That the new behavior is right?
PG is the entire machine. Fortunately we have version numbers, migration strategies, etc. But “here’s a new binary that passes the test suite and… maybe changes everything not covered by tests maybe doesn’t”. Why bother suffering when there are totally reasonable gradual rewrite strategies?
And of course… every bug in the world… got through despite a test suite! What software out there doesn’t have bugs?
And if the behavioral difference in the rewrite does affect people… I guess that’s something right? “Oh this isn’t a bug because it wasn’t covered in regression tests” is not that tenable.
They are not informal AFAIK - https://github.com/PGPerfFarm. A lot of these heavy duty OS projects have explicit Perf testing/nighlites (see Lucene's at https://benchmarks.mikemccandless.com/)
If you are saying the PG regression suite doesn't cover these perf tests - that is fair. I consider perf to be part of the "regression framework" generally.
>> How do you know your new tests are right? That the new behavior is right?
This is a more generic question in the LLM world. Reliable verifiers is what drives LLM loops. If you don't have these, you have no idea if you are actually making progress or you just generated code that returns 42 for every question. You needs something to actually ground the LLM output against. For existing features, the reliable verification is the existing regression/perf suites. For new features, the regression/perf suites should expand to fit. There are ways to go at this that range from ad-hoc (line/branch coverage) to fully formalized (verification-aware languages like Dafny).
Decades of intrinsic knowledge. Which a rewrite lacks.
imho the issue is the language used. AI rewrites are cheap and cheap exercises require a great deal of scrutiny and proof of correctness. Simply using regressions test lacks the intrinsic knowledge of a decades old codebase stuck in developers minds.
Claiming a rewrite is better because it passes all tests is a flex, a new version requires a boatload of evidence for people to accept it as an improvement and not just "passes tests, written in rust via LLM so it must be better". Run it in production for a year in a sufficiently large system and you might be somewhere.
You mean the ones encoded in the regression suite? I think your argument is valid in many medium-to-faang firms where the application is going to have encoded business logic that isn't explicitly tested for. If anything, projects like PG are the exact opposite: no business context and regression suites that test every possible scenario due to the accumulation of bug fixes and context over many years.
>> Run it in production for a year in a sufficiently large system and you might be somewhere.
How do you know every release of PG doesn't break in the setting of "a year in a sufficiently large system"?
Spend time enough with a codebase and you’ll know stuff about its behavior that is not encoded in a test suite. Especially when you need to adjust an integration tests due to the modification of an invariant in a dependency.
> How do you know every release of PG doesn't break in the setting of "a year in a sufficiently large system"?
Because the postgres team is professional and will take care of publishing a changelog for what has been modified since the last version.
Regardless of the technical choices, whether Rust is better or worse, whatever -- pgrust popped into existence thanks to one person driving an LLM through 7000 commits in ~2 weeks. It produced something that passes the regression tests. Even as an LLM-sceptic, I think that's amazing.
From that point, though, it appears to have been completely abandoned. There hasn't been a commit in a month, other than a brief tweak and a note that an as-yet unpublished version that's even betterer is in the works. IDK. I don't think we've acclimated to the shock of the change LLMs create, but if the outcome is a forest of exciting new projects that have a bus factor of 1 and little to no collaboration, I think that's a disservice to this profession.
Is there a huge need to run that typechecking on browsers?
Secondly, WASM isn't the right target for the browser anyway, JS and the DOM have to be what you consider "native", for the most rigorous UI projects at least (which building an IDE is). If you want to build a cross-platform UI product that doesn't require installation and has Emacs-like levels of extensibility, JS is the end of the line in terms of language selection. There are no other candidates.
calibre (with python+Qt) begs to differ. And I believe VLC runs on every current platforms. There's also Code::Blocks and Blender. Cross-platform UI is not rocket-science.
It's not just typechecking, the typescript library is also the reference parser for TypeScript and reference emit. Emitting JS from TypeScript is non-trivial and non-local.
It's not just in browsers, you might want to run the typescript library on the edge or in some restricted environment where JS/WASM is OK but native code is not.
You may want to use the typescript library as a dependency in your own package. TypeScript becoming non-pure JS means that your library also becomes non-pure JS.
Terrible project governance.
TS 7 is a good example of what a responsible team that cares about their users should have done.