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Re: Documenting coding style

Nathan Bossart <nathandbossart@gmail.com>

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From: Nathan Bossart <nathandbossart@gmail.com>
To: Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de>
Cc: Thomas Munro <thomas.munro@gmail.com>, Nazir Bilal Yavuz <byavuz81@gmail.com>, Sami Imseih <samimseih@gmail.com>, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>, Tomas Vondra <tomas@vondra.me>, Michael Paquier <michael@paquier.xyz>, Andrew Dunstan <andrew@dunslane.net>, Amul Sul <sulamul@gmail.com>, Zsolt Parragi <zsolt.parragi@percona.com>, Robert Haas <robertmhaas@gmail.com>, Chao Li <li.evan.chao@gmail.com>, Anthonin Bonnefoy <anthonin.bonnefoy@datadoghq.com>, Fujii Masao <masao.fujii@gmail.com>, Jakub Wartak <jakub.wartak@enterprisedb.com>, PostgreSQL Hackers <pgsql-hackers@lists.postgresql.org>
Date: 2026-04-10T14:49:42Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers 
On Fri, Apr 10, 2026 at 10:17:44AM -0400, Andres Freund wrote:
> On April 10, 2026 3:57:56 AM EDT, Thomas Munro <thomas.munro@gmail.com> wrote:
>> I thought we agreed to stop using Size for new code?  size_t has been
>> around since C89.
> 
> We really need to start documenting some of this stuff somewhere.
> Deciding something a few years ago, deep in a thread, won't actually help
> anyone but the participants (and maybe not even them) to know about it..

I certainly didn't know this.  There's no comment in c.h, either.

> I wonder if we should move the coding style section out of sgml into a
> top-level CODING_STYLE.md or something like that.
> 
> And then obviously add things like Size being deprecated. 

Unless we're going to actually remove the typedef in the near future, I'm
not sure I'd support even marking it deprecated.  If we're going to keep it
around indefinitely, that's just going to become another source of nitpicks
when new contributors inevitably copy/paste some code from the aughts.  A
style page makes the situation a little better, but it's yet another thing
that folks have to remember.

To be clear, if someone proposed a patch that completely removed all traces
of Size, I'd likely support it.  There is indeed no reason not to use
size_t.  (I see that Size has been an alias for size_t since 1998 [0].)
But it's also quite heavily used, so I'd be fine with leaving it around and
considering it fully supported, too.

[0] https://postgr.es/c/0ad5d2a3a8

-- 
nathan

Commits

Same data as JSON: GET /api/v1/messages/:b64id/commits the thread's linked commits as JSON, with link sources. API reference →

  1. Use size_t instead of Size in pg_waldump

  2. More tar portability adjustments.

  3. Further harden tests that might use not-so-compatible tar versions.

  4. Harden astreamer tar parsing logic against archives it can't handle.

  5. Fix pg_waldump/t/001_basic.pl with BSD tar on ZFS.

  6. Remove a low-value, high-risk optimization in pg_waldump.

  7. Fix misuse of simplehash.h hash operations in pg_waldump.

  8. Fix file descriptor leakages in pg_waldump.

  9. Fix poorly-sized buffers in astreamer compression modules.

  10. Remove read_archive_file()'s "count" parameter.

  11. Report detailed errors from XLogFindNextRecord() failures.

  12. Fix assorted bugs in archive_waldump.c.

  13. Remove nonfunctional tar file trailer size check.

  14. Fix finalization of decompressor astreamers.

  15. Move tar detection and compression logic to common.

  16. pg_verifybackup: Enable WAL parsing for tar-format backups

  17. pg_waldump: Add support for reading WAL from tar archives

  18. pg_waldump: Preparatory refactoring for tar archive WAL decoding.

  19. pg_waldump: Remove file-level global WalSegSz.

  20. pg_verifybackup: Verify tar-format backups.