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Date: Sat, 22 Jun 2024 19:32:01 +0200
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From: walther@technowledgy.de
Subject: Re: Meson far from ready on Windows
To: Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de>, Dave Page <dpage@pgadmin.org>
Cc: Nazir Bilal Yavuz <byavuz81@gmail.com>,
 PostgreSQL Developers <pgsql-hackers@lists.postgresql.org>
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Andres Freund:
> FWIW, dynamic linking has a noticeable overhead on other platforms too. A
> non-dependencies-enabled postgres can do about 2x the connections-per-second
> than a fully kitted out postgres can (basically due to more memory mapping
> metadata being copied).  But on windows the overhead is larger because so much
> more happens for every new connections, including loading all dlls from
> scratch.
> 
> I suspect linking a few libraries statically would be quite worth it on
> windows. On other platforms it'd be quite inadvisable to statically link
> libraries, due to security updates, [...]

That's not necessarily true. The nix package manager and thus NixOS 
track all dependencies for a piece of software. If any of the 
dependencies are updated, all dependents are rebuilt, too. So the 
security concern doesn't apply here. There is a "static overlay", which 
builds everything linked fully statically. Unfortunately, PostgreSQL 
doesn't build in that, so far.

Lately, I have been looking into building at least libpq in that static 
overlay, via Meson. There are two related config options:
-Ddefault_library=shared|static|both
-Dprefer_static

The first controls which libraries (libpq, ...) to build ourselves. The 
second controls linking, IIUC also against external dependencies.

Maybe it would be a first step to support -Dprefer_static?

Then this could be set on Windows.

Best,

Wolfgang