Horton

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  1. Add returns_nonnull to infallible allocators

    Tristan Partin <tristan@partin.io> — 2026-07-06T18:10:27Z

    Postgres memory allocators, by default, ERROR out on memory allocation 
failures. An ERROR leads to a longjmp, which means that the caller of 
the allocator will never see a NULL return value. We can explicitly let 
the compiler know about this behavior by adding the returns_nonnull 
attribute to the allocators that follow this behavior. Postgres does 
support _extended versions of some of the allocators that take a flaks 
argument. The caller can provide the MCXT_ALLOC_NO_OOM flag to these 
allocators to request that they return NULL on allocation failure 
instead of ERROR-ing out. The _extended allocators cannot be marked as 
returns_nonnull because of that.

By using returns_nonnull, we can help the compiler to optimize call 
sites.

-- 
Tristan Partin
PostgreSQL Contributors Team
AWS (https://aws.amazon.com)

  2. Re: Add returns_nonnull to infallible allocators

    Tristan Partin <tristan@partin.io> — 2026-07-06T18:11:02Z

    On Mon Jul 6, 2026 at 6:10 PM UTC, Tristan Partin wrote:
> Postgres memory allocators, by default, ERROR out on memory allocation 
> failures. An ERROR leads to a longjmp, which means that the caller of 
> the allocator will never see a NULL return value. We can explicitly let 
> the compiler know about this behavior by adding the returns_nonnull 
> attribute to the allocators that follow this behavior. Postgres does 
> support _extended versions of some of the allocators that take a flaks 
> argument. The caller can provide the MCXT_ALLOC_NO_OOM flag to these 
> allocators to request that they return NULL on allocation failure 
> instead of ERROR-ing out. The _extended allocators cannot be marked as 
> returns_nonnull because of that.
>
> By using returns_nonnull, we can help the compiler to optimize call 
> sites.

...

-- 
Tristan Partin
PostgreSQL Contributors Team
AWS (https://aws.amazon.com)