Re: GSoC Proposal: PL/Mono

Olexandr Melnyk wrote:
> Hello,
>
> I'm interested in applying for this year's GSoC program, to work on
> PL/Mono: pluggable procedural language for PostgreSQL. The main
> purpose of the project is to allow programmers to write stored
> procedures for PostgreSQL database in one of the languages that are
> supported by Mono platform (similar to how they can do it with
> PL/Perl and PL/Python).
>
> As I remember from the past, such attempt already existed and was
> hosted at pgFoundry, but I can't find any files related to it. Does
> anyone know about its status?
>
> I would also like to hear some feedback about the idea (and its
> usefulness) in general.

I think it would be a nice thing to have. It's not going to be easy to
implement (compare it to the different java efforts, which are
probably the closest things to this one), but it should certainly be
doable. A few things to consider:

* Consider the PL/J vs PL/Java implementation models. You'll need to
pick in-proc or out-of-proc. With in-proc, you have the whole
mono-is-threaded thing to go through.

* It would be nice, if it's possible, so support the native .net
framework on win32, and not just Mono. Tohugh Mono runs on Windows
(AFAIK), the windows users will be happier if you can use the one that
comes with the OS. I don't know exactly how much is going to be
required for this.

* You should look at how SQL Server implements stored procs in .net. If
it makes sense, consider using similar syntax, since this would likely
be something that's attractive to people coming from MSSQL.

My recollection of the previous effort is that it got pretty much
nowhere at all. There was some planning and thinking, and a little bit
of code, but none of the hard parts were actually dealt with yet.
Finding the old code might help you a bit, but I doubt it's going to
make a big difference, really.

Someone already said the code was probably lost in the move away from
gborg. If you need it, there is a backup somewhere of that code, so we
can certainly get it out for you.

//Magnus