Re: Mark function arguments of type "T *" as "const T *" where possible
Jacob Champion <jacob.champion@enterprisedb.com>
From: Jacob Champion <jacob.champion@enterprisedb.com>
To: Bertrand Drouvot <bertranddrouvot.pg@gmail.com>
Cc: pgsql-hackers@lists.postgresql.org
Date: 2025-12-11T17:51:49Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers
On Wed, Dec 10, 2025 at 11:22 PM Bertrand Drouvot <bertranddrouvot.pg@gmail.com> wrote: > Also, with the patch in place that would mean "think twice before changing > from const to no const" and that could create doubts and waste of time for future > patch authors. Yeah, exactly. > Let me try to focus on functions that really > deserve the change. I could look at function names that contain "copy" or "cmp", > functions that are used for formatting/printing and size/length calculations as > examples. Sure, that sounds reasonable, and I would hope that those sorts of functions are not very high on the list of backport contention. > Any other ideas? Just that the most useful const additions (IMHO) are going to be places at the top of a big hierarchy, where callers expect something not to be modified, but the lowest levels are too far removed from that expectation for developers to easily remember. I imagine those cases are not going to be easy to find automatically (but that shouldn't discourage incremental improvements that can be found that way). Thanks! --Jacob