Re: Random PGDLLIMPORTing

On 25 November 2016 at 14:16, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> Craig Ringer <craig@2ndquadrant.com> writes:
>> PGDLLIMPORT is free, so the question should be "is there a reason not
>> to add it here?".
>
> TBH, my basic complaint about it is that I do not like Microsoft's tool
> chain assuming that it's entitled to demand that people sprinkle
> Microsoft-specific droppings throughout what would otherwise be platform
> independent source code.

Yeah, I know how you feel. I'm not a fan myself, I just tolerate it as
one of those annoying things we must put up with, like Perl 5.8 for
ancient systems, not using C99, and !Linux/FBSD support. Which,
actually, we _do_ actively work for - take for example the atomics
work, which went to considerable lengths not to break weird niche
platforms.

> However, Victor Wagner's observation upthread is quite troubling:
>
>>> It worth checking actual variable definitions, not just declarations.
>>> I've found recently, that at least in MSVC build system, only
>>> initialized variables are included into postgres.def file, and so are
>>> actually exported from the backend binary.
>
> If this is correct (don't ask me, I don't do Windows) then the issue is
> not whether "PGDLLIMPORT is free".  This puts two separate source-code
> demands on variables that we want to make available to extensions, neither
> of which is practically checkable on non-Windows platforms.

I agree that, if true, that's a real concern and something that needs
addressing to avoid a growing maintenance burden from Windows.

> I think that basically it's going to be on the heads of people who
> want to work on Windows to make sure that things work on that platform.
> That is the contract that every other platform under the sun understands,
> but it seems like Windows people think it's on the rest of us to make
> their platform work.  I'm done with that.

Well, I'm trying to be one of those "Windows people" to the degree of
spotting and addressing issues. Like this one. But it's not worth
arguing this one if it's more than a trivial "meh, done" fix, since
it's likely to only upset code that's testing assertions (like BDR or
pglogical).