PL/Rust Just Shipped: Easy Way to Try It Out¶

As a Rust enthusiast and a contributor to a sister project I am stoked about the release of PL/Rust 1.0.0 that was just announced.

However, its setup instructions are rather long and it takes time to build it. So I took the time to prepare a build for you to try.

As Omnigres is intended to be an application platform, support for multiple languages is important. Hence I decided to spend the day making sure PL/Rust is shipped with Omnigres. Omnigres container image is simply a Postgres image with Omnigres extensions (and now PL/Rust, too.) provisioned.

Try it out now¶

You can start Omnigres with the following commands:

docker volume create omnigres
docker run --name omnigres -e POSTGRES_PASSWORD=omnigres -e POSTGRES_USER=omnigres \
                           -e POSTGRES_DB=omnigres --mount source=omnigres,target=/var/lib/postgresql/data \
           -p 5432:5432 -p 8080:8080 --rm ghcr.io/omnigres/omnigres:latest
# Now you can connect to it:
psql -h localhost -p 5432 -U omnigres omnigres # password is `omnigres`

That's it, now you can try this:

create extension plrust;

create function test() returns bool language plrust as $$ Ok(Some(true)) $$;

select test(); -- => t

It works! The sky is the limit now

What Have I Learned?¶

I got up at 5AM today to make this happen. I am writing this past 5PM. It's been a long day, and I've made a lot of mistakes on the way, and figured out some gotchas.

The amount of space PL/Rust takes is rather not insignificant. I've measured about an 8Gb increase of the image size. While it is not the end of the world for standard cases, this is something to be aware of ¹. I've been told that there are some ideas on how to improve the space usage but it'll never be really slim (Rust compiler itself is not small.)

If you're building PL/Rust in environments like containers, make sure USER environment variable is set. It'll fail to build if it is not.

It also seems to be necessary to have at least 16GB RAM to build it. Not sure about memory requirements in runtime just yet.

First-time function compilation takes an awfully long time. However, one can prime it ahead of time by compiling a test function in a throwaway database. That's what I did in the image above.

It took a while to make sure the container works exactly how I want it to, but it was worth it!

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