Re: [RFC] building postgres with meson

Hi,

On 2021-11-15 14:11:25 -0500, Tom Lane wrote:
> Andres Freund <andres(at)anarazel(dot)de> writes:
> > One important thing to call out: Meson has support for the AIX linker, but
> > *not* the xlc compiler. I.e. one has to use gcc (or clang, but I didn't
> > try). I don't know if we'd require adding support for xlc to meson - xlc is
> > pretty buggy and it doesn't seem particularly crucial to support such an old
> > crufty compiler on a platform that's not used to a significant degree?
>
> While I have no particular interest in AIX or xlc specifically, I do
> worry about us becoming a builds-on-gcc-or-workalikes-only project.
> I suppose MSVC provides a little bit of a cross-check, but I don't
> really like giving up on other compilers. Discounting gcc+clang+MSVC
> leaves just a few buildfarm animals, and the xlc ones are a significant
> part of that population.

Yea, that's a reasonable concern. I wonder if there's some non-mainstream
compiler that actually works on, um, more easily available platforms that we
could utilize.

> (In fact, unless somebody renews fossa/husky's
> icc license, the three xlc animals will be an outright majority of
> them, because wrasse and anole are the only other active animals with
> non-mainstream compilers.)

It should probably be doable to get somebody to run another icc animal. Icc is
supported by meson, fwiw.

> Having said that, I don't plan to be the one trying to get meson
> to add xlc support ...

It'd probably not be too hard. But given that it's quite hard to get access to
AIX + xlc, I'm not sure it's something I want to propose. There's no resources
to run halfway regular tests on that I found...

It's good to make sure we're not growing too reliant on some compiler(s), but
imo only really makes sense if the alternative compilers are meaningfully
available and maintained.

Greetings,

Andres Freund