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Comment by grncdr | Hacker News Reader

It’s funny you mention libpq, because my first thought upon reading the article was “I wonder if a pure Ruby implementation of the postgres wire protocol could possibly lead to performance improvements?

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Probably, but you'd have to reimplement a lot of things you get for free out of libpq (prepared statements, pooler support, other things I'm forgetting about). But fwiw, there's already this: https://github.com/mneumann/postgres-pr

Iirc NodeJS started with a libpq binding but it was moved to pure-JS since as in the article, overhead of going in and out of JIT-land penalized it (as well as lacking any object optimizations).

Do you mean this one: https://node-postgres.com/features/native ? I don't know much about the node ecosystem to judge how many use this instead of libpq bindings, but judging by the number of features mentioned in that page as incompatible, it doesn't look like a free lunch.

This pure Python library claims quite fabulous performance: https://github.com/MagicStack/asyncpg

I believe it because that team have done lots of great stuff but I haven't used it, I just remembered thinking it was interesting the performance was so good. Not sure how related it is to running on the asyncio loop (or which loop they used for benchmarks).

I'd assume that the benchmark is showcasing the gains of the async model, more than making a point that native python is faster than C. The issue is ultimately: how much of the functionality available through libpq is not yet backported to asyncpg (i imagine it's nonzero, but Idon'tknow the answer). Which is why the pragmatic in me still prefer a middle layer like libpq in between.

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