Re: Meson far from ready on Windows

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