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by ajaxian 5744 days ago
Fair point. I didn't intend to diss C, and if one were to write Oracle from scratch today, C is (sadly?) still probably the best option given its performance and portability constraints.

What I had in mind was that for anyone who is technically capable of maintaining the core Oracle DB code base, there are more interesting and rewarding things they could be doing instead.
1 comments
b-man 5743 days ago
I would use something like typed racket or haskell for all the critical parts to increase safety. Then I would check the performance bottlenecks and rewrite them in C if needed.

Then I would use a more programmer friendly language on top of that. Something like Scheme, Ruby, Python and the like.

Stratified design, basically.

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rbanffy 5743 days ago
> I would use something like typed racket or haskell for all the critical parts to increase safety

I am not sure about Haskell, but, from my limited experience, Erlang runs at levels very close to C (my C, at least)

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davidw 5743 days ago
In terms of speed? Erlang's not even in the ballpark that C is in. I'm pretty sure Haskell significantly outperforms Erlang as well.

http://shootout.alioth.debian.org/u32/which-programming-lang...

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rbanffy 5743 days ago
Well... At least my C is regarded as very readable ;-)
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