Re: Making type Datum be 8 bytes everywhere

On Thu, Jul 17, 2025 at 8:10 PM Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> wrote:
> In a discussion on Discord (in the PG #core-hacking channel,
> which unfortunately is inaccessible to non-members), Andres
> and Robert complained about the development/maintenance costs
> of continuing to support 32-bit platforms. Here is a modest
> proposal to reduce those costs without going so far as to
> entirely desupport such platforms: let's require them to use
> 8-byte Datums even though that's probably not a native data
> type for them. That lets us get rid of logic to support the
> !USE_FLOAT8_BYVAL case, and allows a few other simplifications.
>
> The attached patch switches to 8-byte Datums everywhere, but
> doesn't make any effort to remove the now-dead code. I made
> it just as a proof-of-concept that this can work. It compiled
> cleanly and passed check-world for me on a 32-bit FreeBSD
> image.

Sorry for not responding to this thread sooner, but thanks, Tom. I
think this is a great change and I appreciate you doing the legwork.

--
Robert Haas
EDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com