Re: Build issue with postgresql 17 undefined reference to `pg_encoding_to_char' and `pg_char_to_encoding'

Hi Aleksander

Ok. So no actual benefit from using dynamic?
Well, it seems postgresql and all dependencies already support it, no?
Doesn't go do static linking by default / prefer it? Unless you use some
part that uses CGO, in which case many go developers appear to disable CGO
anyway and use the plain go implementation instead.
Similarly, the rust community seems to have a preference / strong support
for static, some with alpine, musl, etc.
We're still developing this part of our system, and do intend to measure
the difference, for this we need to be able to build the static version as
well. I can post results once we have them. Have you measured the
difference?

Br Mikael

On Thu, Oct 10, 2024 at 10:08 PM Aleksander Alekseev <
aleksander(at)timescale(dot)com> wrote:

> Hi Mikael,
>
> > We use static linking and link time optimization to squeeze the last
> bits of performance out of the code in our most performance-critical
> queries, and it simplifies our security audits to have a static binary
> running inside chainguard/static as the data we handle is
> sensitive/business critical.
>
> No comments about the security aspect. I'm not a security expert so I
> leave this topic for somebody for whom this is an area of expertise.
>
> I don't buy the optimization part. The performance gain you get is
> next to nothing compared to the time spent transferring SQL queries
> over the network / UDP sockets, parsing and planning them, accessing
> the disk, waiting for the locks, etc. Unless you actually measured it
> in order to show the opposite which I seriously doubt you did. A
> better time investment would be finding actual bottlenecks in the
> given system in order to be able to eliminate them.
>
> > Aleksander, do you have something against static linking or am I reading
> you wrong? I've seen this sentiment in several places but never understood
> why anyone would hold this position. Could you elaborate?
>
> The question is whether it's practical for the PostgreSQL community to
> put effort into supporting / testing static linking of libpq.
> Personally I'm not convinced that demanding from every open-source
> project in existence to support static linking is a sustainable idea
> in the long run, given the fact that there are technologies like
> Docker and programming languages like Go (with pgx client).
>
> --
> Best regards,
> Aleksander Alekseev
>