Haha TS7 is the next biggest example of, "Let's just do a line by line port to another language instead of seriously examining our architecture"

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raincole 21 hours ago | parent | next [-]

This is the correct approach (I dare to say the only correct approach) when porting to another language. You can examining the architecture later.

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dirtbag__dad 16 hours ago | parent [-]

If you can lock down a test suite that ensures parity, then who cares what shape the lift ultimately looks like.

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

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yathaid 11 hours ago | parent [-]

I like your fair-mindedness but for folks who are anti-LLM-anything, your argument is not the point.

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.

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rtpg 8 hours ago | parent | next [-]

> 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?

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.

	▲	yathaid 6 hours ago \| parent [-]
		>> There are also performance characteristics that are part of an informal spec. 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).

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frio 10 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think what folks want, but aren't quite able to articulate, is an ongoing community and effort that indicate a project will be healthy and maintained. We want to be able to rely upon the software that we are choosing to use.

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.

	▲	yathaid 10 hours ago \| parent [-]
		I am not saying anything about the viability of that particular project; just that one argument that was repeatedly made in that thread which I think is frankly nuts.

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consp 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> 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?

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.

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yathaid 10 hours ago | parent [-]

>> Decades of intrinsic knowledge. Which a rewrite lacks.

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"?

	▲	skydhash 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		> no business context and regression suites that test every possible scenario due to the accumulation of bug fixes and context over many years. 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.

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zarzavat a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Indeed as much I dislike the approach Bun took, at least the port appears to be working. TS7 is going to cause problems for downstream users because Go is the wrong language to use for something that has to run in WASM.

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nicce a day ago | parent | next [-]

> TS7 is going to cause problems for downstream users because Go is the wrong language to use for something that has to run in WASM.

Is there a huge need to run that typechecking on browsers?

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conartist6 a day ago | parent | next [-]

First, yes, the demand to be able to code natively in a browser is, I have reason to suspect, very large. It's just difficult to measure demand when nobody has ever offered a really compelling product. In engineering terms it's like getting a full-scale reading. The real level could be 1% above a full-scale reading, or the real level could be 100x higher than the full-scale reading.

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.

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skydhash a day ago | parent [-]

> 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.

	▲	conartist6 a day ago \| parent [-]
		All great examples, but ones that do require installation. Their website is just where you download the product, I'm talking about making the website the product.

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zarzavat a day ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yes, in the Monaco editor (https://microsoft.github.io/monaco-editor/).

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.

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anon7000 a day ago | parent [-]

NodeJS can strip types internally without a straight TS dependency. I don’t think this matters, TS was a huge bottleneck for many build pipelines because it never parallelized well

	▲	zarzavat 10 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Type stripping is not the same as emit, it only gets you a subset of TypeScript. Fine if you're running your own code, not fine if you want to run arbitrary TypeScript.

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egeozcan 13 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

I think running a typechecker on its target platforms has huge benefits.

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shepherdjerred a day ago | parent | prev [-]

It is incredibly useful

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norman784 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Didn't WASM got a GC proposal that Go and other managed languages can use it? So it might be an issue in most browsers right now, but soon it might not.

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a day ago | parent | prev [-]

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