Re: PostgreSQL Portable Runtime (was Re: [GENERAL] Future of PostgreSQL)

Robert wrote:
> Hi,
>  one of the important factors that contributed to the popularity and success of
> Apache, Perl, Tcl/Tk etc. was their platform independence. I'm big fan of Unix (and
> even bigger of Postgres ;-), but BeOS, MacOS X, even Win2000 all look quite
> interesting too and I don't want to tie myself to just one platform.

I share your aspirations, and your pain. :-) Some of the issues that make each platform
good are the same issues that make them potentially poor candidates for certain kinds
of software, until that platform matures in that area... Some things, like perl, lose
some of their features on MacOS, or NT, because the features aren't available
from the platform. Where this leads my thinking is to look at what each platform would
not support, and then use that to determine whether the resulting product would
be worth using... how much of postgres wouldn't be able to survive on other platforms?

If the answer is "the binaries have compile against new libraries, which don't exist
yet", that's a time consuming issue, and requires pressure on the library authors.
If the issue is "memory mapping in Win2k would break all of the relational schema",
that's a bit bigger. :-)

> Now that
> Mozilla M12 is quite usable I can develop on almost any platform I want... but I
> want Postgres and it brings me back to Unix with its beautifull UI, great multimedia
> support and Age of Empires running under Wine.  *sigh*

You've been away too long, grasshopper. KDE, Gnome, sound/video support, it's all
there... I suggest you talk to the Age of Empires folks about _their_ x-plat
support if you're unhappy with *nix running it under emulation. :-)

-Bop

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