Re: Possible bug in ECPGlib thread-safety (Postgres

On Tue, 16 Dec 2003 12:28 pm, Bruce Momjian wrote:
> > I thinks it's a worthy feature, but perhaps the pre-compiler should warn
> > people that they are relying on non-standard behaviour?
>
> Maybe we could just document its thread-safety as non-standard.

Yes, but my concern is that poor suckers who try to port their code to other
DBs won't be going and reading the PostgreSQL doco to figure out why their
code goes suddenly goes "thud!"

Maybe an additional flag for the pre-compiler to turn the warning off (how
about '--fast-and-loose-thread-behaviour', '-f' for short ?) would stop it
driving regular users mad, while alerting newer ECPG users that they are
relying on an extension that might cause portability issues.

> It would cause people moving _from_ PostgreSQL, but no one does that, of
> course. :-)

Not voluntarily, anyway. Off-topic: having suffered the ravages of Sybase's
isql lately, I've been sorely tempted to add a Sybase-compatibility layer to
psql. I don't know what would be involved (a lot, I imagine) but it's
tempting.

> that AT clause is annoying people

Yes, it's a pain, but multi-threaded apps are more work anyway - I don't think
"AT conn_name" is as onerous as pthread_mutex_lock()ing, which they will
(hopefully) be doing a fair bit of.

Don't get me wrong, the thread-safe extension would be nice, I'd just hate to
see people rely on it without being aware of the portability cost.

Philip.