PostgreSQL supported platforms over time

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2024-04-29 06:30:05

The recent discussion about AIX support in PostgreSQL (as of now removed in PostgreSQL 17) led me to look through the project’s history, to learn what platforms we have supported when.

In this context, “platform” really means operating system. One useful proxy is looking at the files in src/template/, because every supported platform needs to be listed there. There are other dimensions, such as what CPU architectures are supported. Historically, this was tied to the operating system (e.g., HP-UX/HPPA, Alpha/Tru64, AIX/PPC, Irix/MIPS), but nowadays, the combinations are more plentiful. CPU support in PostgreSQL might be the subject of a future article.

As usual, at some point in the distant past, this was all very murky and hard to decipher from the source code history, so let’s start with …

PostgreSQL 6.5 (1999) was the first mention in the source code of support for building on Windows, using MinGW (essentially GCC). I wonder what you could do with this then? It’s listed in the release notes! But official full Windows support didn’t come until much later, so this must have been quite limited.