[cmrdporcupine]

Having worked on writing DB internals in both Rust and in other languages, I can say that there's huge time-saving advantages to having something higher-level & garbage collected at the layer of the query parser/analyzer/compiler. The borrowing/ownership semantics can get really snaky when dealing with complicated expression trees, iteration patterns, etc.

It's fairly hard to write ergonomic interfaces for more complicated iteration patterns in Rust while still respecting safety. That's actually fine and by design, and it's possible with a lot of effort and thought but this is not as much of a concern in e.g. Java. E.g. skim the discussion on this proposed "cursor" API for Rust's stdlib BTree: https://github.com/rust-lang/rust/issues/107540

(And while Rust's enum-based algebraic types & pattern matching are nice, they're actually fairly limited when compared to what you can find in e.g. Scala or F#, Haskell, etc.)

But I think there's also huge win in doing something like the pager/buffer pool/storage/data structure/indexes layer in Rust. For safety and efficiency reasons.