Relying on crashing as a bug recovery system is a good idea? Crashing is just part of the workflow? That's insane, and a good argument against PostgreSQL in any production system.
It is possible PostgreSQL doesn't migrate to a thread based model, and I am not arguing they should.
But debug and patch the causes of these crashes? Absolutely yes, and the sooner, the better.
The fundamental problem is that when you're sharing memory, you cannot safely just stop a single process when encountering an unexpected error. You do not know the current state of your shared data, and if it could lead to further corruption. So restarting everything is the only safe choice in this case.
Like, they are supposed to crash?!?
Erlang users don't seem to agree with you
I think the post upthread references an out-of-core extension we don't control, which in turn depends on many external libraries it doesn't control either...
Building a database which is never gonna crash might be possible but at what cost? Can you name any single real world system archived that? Also, there can be a regression. More tests? Sure but again, at what cost?
While we are trying to get there, having a crash proof architecture is also a very practical approach.
Though to your point, a C extension can totally destroy your data in other ways, and there are likely ways to add more barriers. And hey, we should fix bugs!