Re: [PATCH] unified frontend support for pg_malloc et al and palloc/pfree mulation (was xlogreader-v4)

On Sun, Jan 13, 2013 at 4:16 PM, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> Andres Freund <andres@2ndquadrant.com> writes:
>>> Basically, the aspects of this that I think are likely to be
>>> reproducible wins across different platforms are (a) teaching the
>>> compiler that elog(ERROR) doesn't return, and (b) reducing code size as
>>> much as possible.  The single-function change isn't going to help on
>>> either ground --- maybe it would have helped on (b) without the errno
>>> problem, but that's going to destroy any possible code size savings.
>
>> Agreed. I am happy to produce an updated patch unless youre already on
>> it?
>
> On it now (busy testing on some old slow boxes, else I'd be done already).

Just a random thought here...

There are an awful lot of places in our source tree where the error
level is fixed.  We could invent a new construct, say ereport_error or
so, that is just like ereport except that it takes no error-level
parameter because it's hard-coded to ERROR.

It would be a bit of a pain to change all of the existing call sites,
but presumably it would dodge a lot of these issues about the way
compilers optimize things, because we could simply say categorically
that ereport_error NEVER returns.

-- 
Robert Haas
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