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libpgcommon is a new static library to allow sharing code among the various frontend programs and backend; this lets us eliminate duplicate implementations of common routines. We avoid libpgport, because that's intended as a place for porting issues; per discussion, it seems better to keep them separate. The first use case, and the only implemented by this patch, is pg_malloc and friends, which many frontend programs were already using. At the same time, we can use this to provide palloc emulation functions for the frontend; this way, some palloc-using files in the backend can also be used by the frontend cleanly. To do this, we change palloc() in the backend to be a function instead of a macro on top of MemoryContextAlloc(). This was previously believed to cause loss of performance, but this implementation has been tweaked by Tom and Andres so that on modern compilers it provides a slight improvement over the previous one. This lets us clean up some places that were already with localized hacks. Most of the pg_malloc/palloc changes in this patch were authored by Andres Freund. Zoltán Böszörményi also independently provided a form of that. libpgcommon infrastructure was authored by Álvaro.
src/port/README
libpgport
=========
libpgport must have special behavior. It supplies functions to both
libraries and applications. However, there are two complexities:
1) Libraries need to use object files that are compiled with exactly
the same flags as the library. libpgport might not use the same flags,
so it is necessary to recompile the object files for individual
libraries. This is done by removing -lpgport from the link line:
# Need to recompile any libpgport object files
LIBS := $(filter-out -lpgport, $(LIBS))
and adding infrastructure to recompile the object files:
OBJS= execute.o typename.o descriptor.o data.o error.o prepare.o memory.o \
connect.o misc.o path.o exec.o \
$(filter snprintf.o, $(LIBOBJS))
The problem is that there is no testing of which object files need to be
added, but missing functions usually show up when linking user
applications.
2) For applications, we use -lpgport before -lpq, so the static files
from libpgport are linked first. This avoids having applications
dependent on symbols that are _used_ by libpq, but not intended to be
exported by libpq. libpq's libpgport usage changes over time, so such a
dependency is a problem. Win32, Linux, and Darwin use an export list to
control the symbols exported by libpq.