July 9, 2026
Rust never sleeps, comments never chill
Postgres rewritten in Rust, now passing 100% of the Postgres regression tests
Postgres gets a Rust makeover, and the comments are already fighting about whether it counts
TLDR: A new Rust-based version of PostgreSQL says it now matches the original on over 46,000 checks, a big milestone for a famously trusted database. But commenters instantly split over whether passing tests means anything yet, whether AI was too involved, and whether the project’s legal and plugin choices will scare people off.
A huge coding flex just landed: pgrust says it has rebuilt the brain of PostgreSQL, one of the world’s most popular databases, in Rust, a newer language famous for safety and fewer nasty memory bugs. The big brag? It now matches PostgreSQL’s expected answers on more than 46,000 tests and can even start up from an existing PostgreSQL data folder. That sounds like victory-lap material — except the community immediately turned it into a delicious comment-section cage match.
The loudest split was over one spicy phrase: is this really a rewrite, or an AI rewrite? One commenter basically demanded a label warning, saying people should “heavily differentiate” the two. Others were even less impressed by the test-count chest-thumping, arguing that passing tests is cute, but databases earn trust through years of real-world disasters, fixes, and battle scars. In other words: the crowd is not ready to crown a new king just because it aced the homework.
Then came the side quests. One person raised an eyebrow at the AGPL license, wondering why this project chose a stricter legal setup when regular PostgreSQL has thrived without it. Another cheered the memory-safety angle, while a practical voice cut through the hype with the question everyone in business probably asked first: what about extensions? And yes, there was nerd-comedy too — including a drive-by correction that it’s “SQL-ite,” not “SQ-Lite,” because apparently no launch is complete without pronunciation discourse.
Key Points
- •pgrust is a Rust rewrite of PostgreSQL that targets compatibility with PostgreSQL 18.3.
- •The project says it matched PostgreSQL’s expected output across more than 46,000 regression queries.
- •pgrust is disk compatible with PostgreSQL and can boot from an existing PostgreSQL 18.3 data directory.
- •The project is not production-ready, is not performance optimized, and does not yet generally support existing PostgreSQL extensions such as PL/Python, PL/Perl, and PL/Tcl.
- •The article provides a roadmap, a WebAssembly demo, a Docker image, source build instructions, and regression test commands for trying and validating pgrust.