Andres Freund <andres@2ndquadrant.com> writes:
> On 2014-02-03 12:00:40 +0800, Craig Ringer wrote:
>> I think it's a good thing personally - we shouldn't be exporting every
>> little internal var in the symbol table.
>>
>> If we built with -fvisibility=hidden on 'nix there'd be no need to
>> complain about commits being on on 'nix then breaking on Windows, 'cos
>> the 'nix build would break in the same place. That's all or nothing
>> though, there's no "vars hidden, procs exported" option in gcc.
> To make any form of sense we'd need to have a really separate API
> layer between internal/external stuff. That doesn't seem likely to
> arrive anytime soon, if ever.
Indeed. Aside from the difficulty of having tighter requirements on just
one platform (which, for development purposes, isn't even a mainstream
one), it seems completely silly to me that the restriction applies only
to variables and not functions. We expose *far* more global functions
than global variables; and there's no particular reason to think that
calling a random function is any safer than frobbing a random global
variable.
What we need is to make the Windows platform stop thinking that it is
the center of the world, and make it act as much as possible like the
Unix-oid platforms.
regards, tom lane
