We are currently stuck with the C++17 standard, because C++20 or any newer standards aren't widely supported at the moment. In the future we might want to migrate to newer standards.
We currently assume PKG_DBDIR to be a completely opaque directory
structure, and querying or modifying anything in the directory are done
through pkg_install commands like
pkg_info(1). This is good for tolerating changes in the database
structure, but of course comes with a cost of fork & exec, which is
mitigated by spawning many of them and letting them run in parallel. Think
twice before changing this.