Re: A Windows x64 port of PostgreSQL

On Wed, Jul 2, 2008 at 9:09 AM, Bernd Helmle <mailings(at)oopsware(dot)de> wrote:
> --On Mittwoch, Juli 02, 2008 07:39:29 -0400 Ken Camann <kjcamann(at)gmail(dot)com>
> wrote:
>
>> I assume it would only really matter if you did this to
>> a pointer, and perhaps that is happening somewhere (but I doubt it
>> since postgres runs fine on 64-bit POSIX OSes). These would be easy
>> to fix, but very annoying given the number of them.
>
> At least, every Datum depends on something like that, see
> src/include/postgres.h:
>
> sizeof(Datum) == sizeof(long) >= sizeof(void *) >= 4

Oh I see. Between this and looking again at the warning list, I see
that it will probably take a lot more work than I thought. There are
about 450 occurrences of the assumption that sizeof(size_t) ==
sizeof(int). Many of them come from string functions, but many are in
important files like the tuplestore.c, bufpage.c, etc. I assume these
these would need to be checked very carefully, and probably by someone
who understands the internals better than I do.

I'd really like to help out with this, but I'm not sure I can work on
a patch even if I change these things for myself. Fixing this code
would touch a lot of important internals in postgres (albeit in a
small way), so my patch would probably not be accepted. I assume this
kind of thing has to be done by someone a little closer to the project
because it would modify so many things. On the other hand, if I just
do this for myself and don't share it then I lose x64 support again
when 8.4 comes out...and I really want the on-disk bitmap indices and
better partitioning (if the latter ends up coming).

So I'm not really sure what to do. I've never contributed to anything
before, and I've actually never even used CVS. I will probably start
making changes for myself, but before I do I'd like to know if I
should bother doing it in such a way that might be useful to the
community.

Thanks,
Ken