rpgffi

Wow I think i build one of the first pg-rust-cdc replication module for postgresql and now it seems mainstream. It was a part of my https://github.com/posix4e/rpgffi project, which is garbage code I'm now embarrassed about. Rust programming has come a long way and we didn't have the best practices. Now it seems actual grownup engineering teams are living the dream. We truly live in the best of all universes.

Also of interest: rpgffi - https://github.com/posix4e/rpgffi "R(Rust) PG(Postgresql) FFI (Foreign Function Interface)"

Since a lot of languages have FFIs for C this made me wonder, did anyone try to write a PostgreSQL extension in... Rust? Turns out a few people have been working on doing just that. * JSONDC, a PostgreSQL extension written in Rust. Latest commit about a month ago. 161 commits in total. Authors say “It is written in Rust and, being short, is a good skeleton project for other would be plugin authors who'd like to use Rust to write Postgres extensions”. https://github.com/instructure/jsoncdc * pgxr. Latest commit 20 days ago. 23 commits in total. “Write PostgreSQL extension functions (as stored procedures) using Rust.”. https://github.com/clia/pgxr * RPGFFI. Latest commit about a year ago. 33 commits in total. “Imagine being able to create postgresql extensions in rust. We generate bindgen (0.29.1) pg apis for [...]”. https://github.com/posi

A different approach I wrote in rust https://github.com/posix4e/rpgffi With some example consumers: https://github.com/durch/google-bigtable-postgres-fdw https://github.com/posix4e/jsoncdc

I'm not sure there's much reason to rewrite Postgres as a whole. If there are specific subsystems which are common sources of CVE they might be targets, but looking at the list[0] no specific system really seems to jump out. Extensions could be neat, there doesn't seem to be a high-level Rust API for it (in the style of ruru or rust-cpython) yet though, only incomplete-looking bindgen: https://github.com/posix4e/rpgffi [0] https://cve.mitre.org/cgi-bin/cvekey.cgi?keyword=postgresql

Postgres's extension APIs are pretty good and Rust's interoperability with C makes it quite feasible to extend the database without rewriting it. Some months ago we wrote a logical decoder -- to capture and forward the write-ahead log as JSON -- in Rust and later were able to pull out some helpful bindings for logical decoders, foreign data wrappers and so forth. The logical decoder: http://pgxn.org/dist/jsoncdc The bindings: https://github.com/posix4e/rpgffi The extensibility of Postgres is really profound -- there are so many things you can do, and so much internal functionality you can access, without having to recompile the database. The way extensions are loaded also mitigates the risk of what can be admittedly tricky issues relating to safety. Extensions run in backend processes, not the postmaster. If rewriting Postgres happens, I