Re: BUG #14722: Segfault in tuplesort_heap_siftup, 32 bit overflow

On Wed, Jul 12, 2017 at 9:20 AM, Heikki Linnakangas <hlinnaka@iki.fi> wrote:
>> Uh ... what assumption?  That's certainly true on any twos-complement
>> machine.  Besides, if you're worried about hypothetical portability
>> issues, ...
>
>
> Right, it's a hypothetical portability issue. The assumption we're making is
> that UINT_MAX >= INT_MAX * 2 + 1. I'm not aware of any system where it's not
> true, but I don't know what the C standards say about that.

Intuitively, it seems very likely to be true, since two's complement
arithmetic is already assumed by Postgres, and addition and
multiplication work the same way at the instruction level for unsigned
and signed (two's complement) integers. In order for this to break,
int and unsigned int would have to have different widths.

> Well, you could do Min(INT_MAX, (UINT_MAX - 1 / 2). Or just add a
> StaticAssertion for it. Or just note in a comment that we're making that
> assumption.

I like the idea of a StaticAssertion().

-- 
Peter Geoghegan