Peter Eisentraut <peter@eisentraut.org> writes:
> The existing check in configure is because certain Linux distributions
> used to compile everything with -ffast-math to be "faster", and that
> kept breaking PostgreSQL and so we wanted to stop them very early.
> These are gone, and the defenses in the code like date.c should be
> sufficient for any new attempts. I think we could remove the check in
> configure.
The defenses in those modules are probably obsolete too: aren't they about
ensuring exact results with floating-point timestamps? My gut reaction to
this was maybe we could remove *all* of that, so now I'm curious what
problem Bertrand ran into.
It could be that these old defenses are protecting us against roundoff
issues in some relatively-new floating-point functions, but if that's
true then we should move the checks to where they are important today.
regards, tom lane
