Re: Meson far from ready on Windows

Hi

On Sat, 22 Jun 2024 at 17:32, Andres Freund <andres(at)anarazel(dot)de> wrote:

> > I don't think it's unreasonable to not support static linking, but I take
> > your point.
>
> Separately from this thread: ISTM that on windows it'd be quite beneficial
> to
> link a few things statically, given how annoying dealing with dlls can be?
> There's also the perf issue addressed further down.
>

Dealing with DLLs largely just boils down to copying them into the right
place when packaging. The perf issue is a much more compelling reason to
look at static linking imho.

>
>
> > My assumption all along was that Meson would replace autoconf etc. before
> > anything happened with MSVC, precisely because that's the type of
> > environment all the Postgres devs work in primarily. Instead we seem to
> > have taken what I think is a flawed approach of entirely replacing the
> > build system on the platform none of the devs use, whilst leaving the new
> > system as an experimental option on the platforms it will have had orders
> > of magnitude more testing.
>
> The old system was a major bottleneck. For one, there was no way to run all
> tests. And even the tests that one could run, would run serially, leading
> to
> exceedingly long tests times. While that could partially be addressed by
> having both buildsystems in parallel, the old one would frequently break
> in a
> way that one couldn't reproduce on other systems. And resource wise it
> wasn't
> feasible to test both old and new system for cfbot/CI.
>

Hmm, I've found that running the tests under Meson takes notably longer
than the old system - maybe 5 - 10x longer ("meson test" vs. "vcregress
check"). I haven't yet put any effort into figuring out a cause for that
yet.

> FWIW, dynamic linking has a noticeable overhead on other platforms too. A
> non-dependencies-enabled postgres can do about 2x the
> connections-per-second
> than a fully kitted out postgres can (basically due to more memory mapping
> metadata being copied). But on windows the overhead is larger because so
> much
> more happens for every new connections, including loading all dlls from
> scratch.
>
> I suspect linking a few libraries statically would be quite worth it on
> windows. On other platforms it'd be quite inadvisable to statically link
> libraries, due to security updates, but for stuff like the EDB windows
> installer dynamic linking doesn't really help with that afaict?
>

Correct - we're shipping the dependencies ourselves, so we have to
rewrap/retest anyway.

--
Dave Page
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