Yay for Clang

Posted Jan 27, 2026 13:24 UTC (Tue) by farnz (subscriber, #17727)
In reply to: Yay for Clang by Wol
Parent article: GNU C Library 2.43 released

For the first point - just because something is technically better in theory does not mean that all implementations are inherently better. Compare MySQL and PostgreSQL, for example - they both implement the same theory, yet do not have the same feature sets.

For the second: because SQL is not a great representation of relational, and you need an optimizer to go from the SQL query to a decent relational query. In addition, relational allows you to simply describe some very complex queries that in MV are simply not possible, and the optimizer allows the database engine to find a fast way to perform that query - where in MV, you just don't do that because you can't.

Put another way, those questions are like "why are planes not as good as buses at taking me on a 50 mile trip? Why do planes need autopilots, when buses don't - it's easy to show that an autopilot for buses would cost more than it saves?".