Now, granted, I prefer dynamic environments like those provided by Perl, Ruby, Python, and just about every other scripting language known to man, but I really am interested to know exactly what’s wrong with C.

A while back, I wrote about my search for distributed/parallel databases and the problems that I see with the current offerings. The status hasn’t changed much since that point, but tonight, realizing that I hadn’t worked on my own attempt at such in a while, I took another look and found gridsql. It’s basically a front-end to PostgreSQL that distributes the data that it receives to any number of pgsql nodes, then intelligently parallelizes the queries over the back-end mesh. Super. That’s exactly the sort of thing that I’m looking for.

The problem that I have with it is that it’s written in Java.

JAVA.

Don’t get me wrong in this. I do like the Java language. When I’m prototyping something and desire strong typing and so on, I usually look to Java … for prototyping, not for production code. In the end, I’m always going to use anything but Java, most typically C++, as it’s a fairly straight-forward porting process, but sometimes C, Perl, Ruby, Python … anything that doesn’t start with ‘J’ and end with “ava.”

I don’t know if I’m going to work on my makeshift distributed database anymore. I was writing it in Perl (which, to me, is so much like C that I don’t feel too bad about writing a daemon in Perl), and I what I consider to be a few novel ways of doing things. A good portion of the front-end is finished. It parses out queries, and is pretty much just waiting for a storage engine (which was going to be multiple BerkeleyDB databases per table). I might jump back into the project at some point, but right now, I’m all but fed up with the entire idea, especially after seeing the stuff that’s already out there. Typically, that would drive me further in the desire to work on it, but right now, that’s not the case.

Instead, I think I’m going to brush up on my C chops a bit. It’s been a good long while, and I’m plenty rusty (particularly in terms of the idiosyncracies of the language), what with the weakly-typed dynamic languages that I’ve been predominantly using for the last several years.