Dan Luu backs pgrust: the Postgres Rust rewrite keeps finding real Postgres bugs
DanielLockyer · x · 2026-10-25
Dan Luu argues "we should be more ambitious with the software we build," defending Michael Malis's pgrust — a Rust rewrite of Postgres that most news aggregators dismiss as vibe-slop.
Key points:
- Despite the skepticism, pgrust's testing is deep enough to uncover genuine bugs in Postgres itself: a numerical bug breaking valid SP-GiST operations, a format cache bug yielding wrong JSONPath results, a pgcrypto bug, multiple memory-safety issues in the dictionary loader, a money overflow bug, and more.
- The project's main pitch is performance; even if pgrust fails, demonstrated optimizations could land in Postgres or ClickHouse, and the filed Postgres bug fixes are already a durable contribution.
- Luu concedes most rewrite projects are slop and the community's default suspicion is understandable — few have time to investigate each one, and his trust comes from knowing Malis personally.
The piece probes a real AI-era engineering question: judge projects by provenance, or by verifiable evidence of quality.
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