Re: fork()-safety, thread-safety

On 6 October 2017 at 06:49, Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
> Andres Freund <andres(at)anarazel(dot)de> writes:
>> On 2017-10-05 17:31:07 -0500, Nico Williams wrote:
>>> You don't think eliminating a large difference between handling of WIN32
>>> vs. POSIX is a good reason?
>
>> I seems like you'd not really get a much reduced set of differences,
>> just a *different* set of differences. After investing time.
>
> Yeah -- unless we're prepared to drop threadless systems altogether,
> this doesn't seem like it does much for maintainability. It might even
> be a net negative on that score, due to reducing the amount of testing
> the now-legacy code path would get.
>
> If there were reason to think we'd get a large performance benefit,
> or some other concrete win, it might be worth putting time into this.
> But I see no reason to believe that.
>
> (There's certainly an argument to be made that no-one cares about
> platforms without thread support anymore. But I'm unconvinced that
> rewriting existing code that works fine is the most productive
> way to exploit such a choice if we were to make it.)

The only thing that gets me excited about a threaded postgres is the
ability to have a PL/Java, PL/Mono etc that don't suck. We could do
some really cool things that just aren't practical right now.

Not compelling to a wide audience, really.

--
Craig Ringer http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/
PostgreSQL Development, 24x7 Support, Training & Services