Horton

Re: Some efforts to get rid of "long" in our codebase

Peter Eisentraut <peter@eisentraut.org>

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From: Peter Eisentraut <peter@eisentraut.org>
To: David Rowley <dgrowleyml@gmail.com>, PostgreSQL Developers <pgsql-hackers@lists.postgresql.org>
Date: 2025-11-06T18:33:12Z
Lists: pgsql-hackers

Commits

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  1. Adjust MemSet macro to use size_t rather than long

  2. Get rid of long datatype in CATCACHE_STATS enabled builds

On 06.11.25 12:46, David Rowley wrote:
> 0002: MemSet / MemSetAligned macros. It's probably about time someone
> made these disappear, but that's likely for another thread with more
> research than I'd like to do here. I replaced "long" with "Size". I
> also considered "uintptr_t", but after some reading of the C standard,
> I settled on Size as it seems it's possible for platforms to exist
> where the pointer width is smaller than the processor's width. I
> suspect it might not matter for the platforms we support? Size could
> also be smaller than the processor's width, but I feel that's less
> likely.

I think size_t/Size could be misleading here.  You're not measuring any 
size, you're just chunking up the bytes to zero into something that we 
thing the compiler or CPU can handle very efficiently.

So in a sense, using long isn't wrong here.  It might well be the best 
for this.  If there is an aversion to using any long at all, why not 
long long.