Re: Mark all GUC variable as PGDLLIMPORT

On 23.08.21 16:47, Julien Rouhaud wrote:
> On Mon, Aug 23, 2021 at 10:36 PM Bruce Momjian <bruce@momjian.us> wrote:
>>
>> So the problem is that extensions only _need_ to use that API on
>> Windows, so many initially don't, or that the API is too limited?
> 
> The inconvenience with that API is that it's only returning c strings,
> so you gave to convert it back to the original datatype.  That's
> probably why most of the extensions simply read from the original
> exposed variable rather than using the API, because they're usually
> written on Linux or similar, not because they want to mess up the
> stored value.

If there were an API, then in-core code should use it as well.

If, for example, an extension wanted to define a "float16" type, then it 
should be able to access extra_float_digits in the *same way* as 
float4out() and float8out() can access it.  This is clearly not possible 
today.