Recently I saw a news report about how Postgres was translated into Rust.  It’s not 100% completed, but it passes 40,000+ tests with the same output as actual Postgres.  Of course, the author leaned heavily on LLMs.  I’m not convinced that simply because there’s a 40,000+ test suite for Pg and your rewritten Pg can pass those tests, that makes it a safe replacement for Pg.  No test suite covers everything.  Rewriting Pg in Rust is probably not a bad idea – though on the other hand, I don’t know that Pg is broken or in dire need of a rewrite.

They describe their method as:

My approach has changed throughout the course of this project. Throughout most of the project, we were working off of a c2rust translation of Postgres to Rust. That gave us a bunch of Rust code that was unsafe but did pass the Postgres test suite and was fast. c2rust had split Postgres into 1000 different crates. We then went through 1 by 1 and rewrote each crate into idiomatic rust.

Before LLMs existed, the idea of taking a codebase as large as Postgres and rewriting it in another language would have been prohibitively time-consuming.  Now this kind of work appears trivial.  The first commit on the pgrust repo is less than a month ago.

Today while reading Facebook (yes, it still exists), I saw a suggested post in a Linux group about a guy who said “I like Linux, but there are a few things about its model — and the Unix model in general — that I have disliked for a long time…” followed by a rather silly list of complaints.  For example, he didn’t like that everything is a file and that you can mount a filesystem anywhere on the tree.  So he “designed and developed my own kernel and userspace, and the result is my experimental open-source system.”   It’s described as “a microkernel OS written in Rust, based on typed objects, capability-based security, isolated services/drivers, and explicit volumes instead of classic mount points.”

You can check it out here.  Once again, the first commit on the repo is less than a month ago.  (And amusingly he’s already asking for donations!)

Now, on the one hand, a vibe-coded OS is kind of silly.  On the other hand, until very recently, it was impossible.  The OS Dev wiki says:

No one who isn’t already a seasoned developer with years of experience in several languages and environments should even be considering OS Dev yet. A decade of programming, including a few years of low-level coding in assembly language and/or a systems language such as C, is pretty much the minimum necessary to even understand the topic well enough to work in it.

Yeah, the bold italic is theirs.  Looking at the “Liber System” author’s Facebook profile, it’s evident he doesn’t have 10 years of coding just based on his apparent age.

Skip forward five or ten years.  Maybe we’ll all be vibe-coding our operating systems.  Oh, they won’t run Microsoft Office or Elden Ring?  We can vibe-code those, too.  Maybe the future is not reading a book about Ubuntu but rather spending a few minutes writing some paragraphs about what you want your OS to be like and pressing submit.

Are we there yet?  No.  But we might be close enough to glimpse that kind of future.

raindog308

raindog308 is a longtime community LETizen, technical writer, and self-described techno polymath. With deep roots in the *nix world, he has a passion for systems both modern and vintage, ranging from Unix, Perl, Python, and Golang to shell scripting and mainframe-era operating systems like MVS. He’s equally comfortable with relational database systems, having spent years working with Oracle, PostgreSQL, and MySQL.

As an avid user of LowEndBox providers, raindog308 runs an empire of LEBs, from tiny boxes for VPNs, to mid-sized instances for application hosting, and heavyweight servers for data storage and complex databases. He brings both technical rigor and real-world experience to every piece he writes.

Beyond the command line, raindog308 has a life-long love of German Shepherd Dogs, high-quality knives, target shooting, theology, tabletop RPGs, playing guitar, and hiking in deep, quiet forests.

His goal with every article is to help users, from beginners to seasoned sysadmins, get more value, performance, and enjoyment out of their infrastructure.

You can find him daily in the forums at LowEndTalk under the handle @raindog308.