Hi, On 2023-05-24 14:33:06 +0000, Hans Buschmann wrote: > I recently stumbled over the following Intel proposal for dropping 32bit > support in x86 processors. [1]
It's a proposal for something in the future. Which, even if implemented as is, will affect future hardware, several years down the line. I don't think that's a good reason for removing 32 bit support in postgres. And postgres is used on non-x86 architectures... > This inspired me to propose dropping 32bit support for PostgreSQL starting > with PG17. > ... > Even if I am not a postgres hacker I suppose this could simplify things quite > a lot. There's some simplification, but I don't think it'd be that much. I do think there are code removals and simplifications that would be bigger than dropping 32bit support. Dropping support for effectively-obsolete compilers like sun studio (requires random environment variables to be exported to not run out of memory) and AIX's xlc (requires a lot of extra compiler flags to be passed in for a sane build) would remove a fair bit of code. Dropping CPUs without native atomic operations / without a way to do tear-free 8 byte reads would make several substantial performance improvements easier, while not really dropping any relevant platform. Etc. Greetings, Andres Freund
