Programming at Light Speed: Building the Gravity Query Engine

pgrust v0.4-beta's new Gravity query engine achieves 3x faster performance than ClickHouse on ClickBench while supporting full Postgres SQL compatibility by using a JIT compiler that generates optimized machine code for SQL queries. The team designed Gravity by first determining the theoretical maximum performance ("light speed") through hand-optimized Rust programs, then built the compiler to get within 20% of that ceiling using techniques like batching, operator fusion, and SIMD. This top-down approach contrasts with traditional bottom-up optimization and allows the engine to achieve near-optimal performance for analytical queries.