I'm aware of that, but these elementary operations have some definitions in code. Even just calling them in a fixed sequence (as opposed to dispatching at runtime one opcode at a time) would be something optimizable for a sufficiently smart compiler. However, given a good-enough design of the whole system, straight code generation from the query plan shouldn't be a problem either (and at that point, the Zig compiler should be able to do even more work with the generated query code). I mean, any reimplementation would presumably use Zig features heavily anyway -- otherwise you could just link with the C code.