Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com> writes:
> On Thu, Jan 18, 2018 at 12:24 PM, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
>> Really, this is something that the compiler ought to do for us, IMO.
>> If the gcc guys don't want to be bothered, OK, but that tells you more
>> about the priority they place on SPARC support than anything else.
> Of course, the same accusation could be leveled at us. We don't
> require int128 support for correctness; we just use it for performance
> where it's available and works the way we want. Prolly, that means
> mainstream platforms. If we wanted to work harder, we could get it
> working in other places too. Or some other fix that delivers much of
> the same performance benefit.
Sure. Part of the equation here is that (IMO anyway) int128 isn't
sufficiently performance-critical to us to justify putting enormous
amounts of work into trying to make it go on non-mainstream platforms.
It's possible that that could change in future ... but if part of the
cost is notational changes that make it harder and more bug-prone
to use int128 at all, then I daresay int128 will never become that
performance-critical, because it would always remain a niche thing.
regards, tom lane