Re: Use of "long" in incremental sort code

On Mon, Jun 29, 2020 at 9:13 PM David Rowley <dgrowleyml@gmail.com> wrote:
> I noticed the incremental sort code makes use of the long datatype a
> few times, e.g in TuplesortInstrumentation and
> IncrementalSortGroupInfo.

I agree that long is terrible, and should generally be avoided.

> Maybe Size would be better for the in-memory fields and uint64 for the
> on-disk fields?

FWIW we have to use int64 for the in-memory tuplesort.c fields. This
is because it must be possible for the fields to have negative values
in the context of tuplesort. If there is going to be a general rule
for in-memory fields, then ISTM that it'll have to be "use int64".

logtape.c uses long for on-disk fields. It also relies on negative
values, albeit to a fairly limited degree (it uses -1 as a magic
value).

-- 
Peter Geoghegan