Date: 2025-05-14
Time: 11:30–12:20
Room: Breakout Room 2
Level: Intermediate
These things might appear to move at glacial speeds, but sometimes new things do actually happen in C and POSIX, the programming language environment that PostgreSQL is built on. A new C standard and a new POSIX standard both were released in 2024. And of course there are several predecessor versions of those standards that PostgreSQL has not adopted yet.
In this presentation, I'll show how the C and POSIX standards are developed, what the state of implementation of the different versions is in different compilers and different operating systems and when they might become relevant to PostgreSQL development. I'll demonstrate some of the new features and how they could be applied to PostgreSQL source code. We'll discuss how we can apply these facilities to support ongoing themes in PostgreSQL development, such as thread-safety, improved locale support, better type safety, and better code generation.