With Arc and HN and now Bel, I think pg is still exploring what a system could look like without major compromises to accommodate the limits of today’s hardware

With Arc and HN and now Bel, I think pg is still exploring what a system could look like without major compromises to accommodate the limits of today’s hardware. For example, the first cut at pagination put something like a continuation ID into a URL, which only worked until that continuation was GC’d or the one and only server process got bounced. If you wanted a highly scalable HN and nothing more, you’d let Postgres or some graph database do the heavy lifting, add a Racket or Clojure frontend, and call it a day. But that’s pretty boring plumbing work, and doesn’t get you closer to the hundred-year language he’s aiming for.