Re: Is there a way to build PostgreSQL client libraries with MinGW

On 01/20/2011 09:52 PM, Robert Haas wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 20, 2011 at 10:17 AM, XiaoboGu<guxiaobo1982(at)gmail(dot)com> wrote:
>> Hi,
>> We are using R to work with 64bit PostgreSQL client libraries, and
>> to avoid compiler compatibility issues the R development community suggest
>> using the same compiler for both the main application and dlls. So do you
>> have any experience to build libpq.dll using MinGW 64 bit. Thanks.
> According to the documentation, it's not supported.
>
> http://www.postgresql.org/docs/current/static/install-win32.html
>
> "Building using MinGW or Cygwin uses the normal build system, see
> Chapter 15 and the specific notes in Section 15.8.5 and Section
> 15.8.2. These builds cannot generate 64-bit binaries. Cygwin is not
> recommended and should only be used for older versions of Windows
> where the native build does not work, such as Windows 98. MinGW is
> only recommended if you are building other modules using it. The
> official binaries are built using Visual Studio."

That advice needs to be taken with a grain or two of salt. First, while
you probably should not use Cygwin postgres as a production server, it
is still the best way to run psql on Windows that I know of. And second,
the stuff about not being able to generate 64-bit binaries with Mingw is
no longer true (that's why it's no longer called Mingw32), although it
is true that nobody I know has yet tried to do so. It's on my long TODO
list, and well worth doing. (Relying on one compiler is the techno
equivalent of monolingualism, which my sister's bumper sticker used to
tell me is a curable condition.)

cheers

andrew