31 Mar
2018
31 Mar
'18
2:52 a.m.
[Larry McVoy said ...]
> CMU's Mach, mem, I am by no means a fan (I
bought into the hype, read
> all the papers, when I finally got to see the code, wow. NOTHING like Sun's
> VM system, I mean, nothing. It claimed to be the same sort of thing, it was
> an ugly mess and it still is.
This is typical of university research projects. To those of us who
worked in the Postgres research group at UC Berkeley, one of the great
mysteries of the world is how the PostgreSQL community was able to take
the research Postgres code and make it into the production quality
database it is now.
Most research projects suffer because the goal of the people who
work on it is to hack on it to get their research done, so that
they can get their MS/PhD and then get the hell out. Code quality
is rarely a major concern. Postgres (and Ingres) benefited from
having a Chief Programmer who attempted to minimize this problem.
Jon Forrest