On Mon, Jun 10, 2024 at 06:49:11PM -0700, Andres Freund wrote:
> On 2024-06-10 16:46:56 -0400, Andrew Dunstan wrote:
> > On 2024-06-10 Mo 16:04, Andres Freund wrote:
> > > Just for context for the rest the email: I think we desperately need to move
> > > off perl for tests. The infrastructure around our testing is basically
> > > unmaintained and just about nobody that started doing dev stuff in the last 10
> > > years learned perl.
> > As for what up and coming developers learn, they mostly don't learn C
> > either, and that's far more critical to what we do.
>
> C is a a lot more useful to to them than perl. And it's actually far more
> widely known these days than perl.
If we're going to test in a non-Perl language, I'd pick C over Python. There
would be several other unlikely-community-choice languages I'd pick over
Python (C#, Java, C++). We'd need a library like today's Perl
PostgreSQL::Test to make C-language tests nice, but the same would apply to
any new language.
I also want the initial scope to be the new language coexisting with the
existing Perl tests. If a bulk translation ever happens, it should happen
long after the debut of the new framework. That said, I don't much trust a
human-written bulk language translation to go through without some tests
accidentally ceasing to test what they test in Perl today.