Hi, On 2021-11-15 14:11:25 -0500, Tom Lane wrote: > Andres Freund <and...@anarazel.de> writes: > > One important thing to call out: Meson has support for the AIX linker, but > > *not* the xlc compiler. I.e. one has to use gcc (or clang, but I didn't > > try). I don't know if we'd require adding support for xlc to meson - xlc > > is > > pretty buggy and it doesn't seem particularly crucial to support such an > > old > > crufty compiler on a platform that's not used to a significant degree? > > While I have no particular interest in AIX or xlc specifically, I do > worry about us becoming a builds-on-gcc-or-workalikes-only project. > I suppose MSVC provides a little bit of a cross-check, but I don't > really like giving up on other compilers. Discounting gcc+clang+MSVC > leaves just a few buildfarm animals, and the xlc ones are a significant > part of that population.
Yea, that's a reasonable concern. I wonder if there's some non-mainstream compiler that actually works on, um, more easily available platforms that we could utilize. > (In fact, unless somebody renews fossa/husky's > icc license, the three xlc animals will be an outright majority of > them, because wrasse and anole are the only other active animals with > non-mainstream compilers.) It should probably be doable to get somebody to run another icc animal. Icc is supported by meson, fwiw. > Having said that, I don't plan to be the one trying to get meson > to add xlc support ... It'd probably not be too hard. But given that it's quite hard to get access to AIX + xlc, I'm not sure it's something I want to propose. There's no resources to run halfway regular tests on that I found... It's good to make sure we're not growing too reliant on some compiler(s), but imo only really makes sense if the alternative compilers are meaningfully available and maintained. Greetings, Andres Freund