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

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