Re: unrecognized node type while displaying a Path due to dangling pointer

On Wed, 12 Jul 2023 at 14:50, David Rowley <dgrowleyml@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Wed, 12 Jul 2023 at 14:23, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> > I did think about that, but "shallow copy a Path" seems nontrivial
> > because the Path structs are all different sizes.  Maybe it is worth
> > building some infrastructure to support that?
>
> It seems a reasonable thing to have to do.  It seems the minimum thing
> we could do to ensure each Path is only mentioned in at most 1
> RelOptInfo.

I've attached a draft patch which adds copyObjectFlat() and supports
all Node types asides from the ones mentioned in @extra_tags in
gen_node_support.pl.  This did require including all the node header
files in copyfuncs.c, which that file seems to have avoided until now.

I also didn't do anything about ExtensibleNode types. I assume just
copying the ExtensibleNode isn't good enough. To flat copy the actual
node I think would require adding a new function to
ExtensibleNodeMethods.

I was also unsure what we should do when shallow copying a List. The
problem there is if we just do a shallow copy, a repalloc() on the
elements array would end up pfreeing memory that might be used by a
shallow copied clone.  Perhaps List is not unique in that regard?
Maybe the solution there is to add a special case and list_copy()
Lists like what is done in copyObjectImpl().

I'm hoping the attached patch will at least assist in moving the
discussion along.

David