Remove Item type
Continuing the theme of cleaning up old and weird stuff in the code, I
propose to remove the Item type. It's defined as
typedef Pointer Item;
(note that Pointer is char *), and its almost only use is as part of
PageAddItem*():
extern OffsetNumber PageAddItemExtended(Page page, Item item, Size size,
OffsetNumber offsetNumber, int flags);
The actual thing passed to PageAddItem*() is of some AM-specific type,
and so that forces casts in all calls, like
offnum = PageAddItem(page, (Item) tuple, tuplen, offnum, true, false);
So this type doesn't promote any type safety, but in fact sort of forces
the opposite.
And then we have the usual problem that this is a type that hides
pointerness, and so we can't add any qualifiers, which leads to some
unconstify nonsense.
(Also, Item is unrelated to ItemPointer, which seems confusing.)
Initially I considered creating some underlying type to point to like
ItemData, but that didn't seem useful. Ultimately, PageAddItem*() is
just a fancy memcpy(), and using void * is an idiomatic way to refer to
a generic chunk of memory. So I'm proposing to remove the Item type,
replace it with void * in function prototypes, and remove all the casts.
Extension authors can make their code backward compatible by replacing
PageAddItem(page, (Item) tuple, ...)
with
PageAddItem(page, (void *) tuple, ...)
On Mon, Sep 29, 2025 at 12:20:00PM +0200, Peter Eisentraut wrote:
So I'm proposing to remove the Item type, replace it with void * in
function prototypes, and remove all the casts.
The general idea seems reasonable to me, but I'm a little concerned that
using "void *" could break extensions written in C++ (see commit d5ca15e).
I haven't confirmed there's an actual issue here, though.
--
nathan
On Mon, Sep 29, 2025 at 6:20 AM Peter Eisentraut <peter@eisentraut.org> wrote:
Continuing the theme of cleaning up old and weird stuff in the code, I
propose to remove the Item type.
+1
--
Peter Geoghegan
On 24.10.25 17:32, Nathan Bossart wrote:
On Mon, Sep 29, 2025 at 12:20:00PM +0200, Peter Eisentraut wrote:
So I'm proposing to remove the Item type, replace it with void * in
function prototypes, and remove all the casts.The general idea seems reasonable to me, but I'm a little concerned that
using "void *" could break extensions written in C++ (see commit d5ca15e).
I haven't confirmed there's an actual issue here, though.
Thanks for checking. This is not a problem, because what C++ disallows
is implicit conversion from void * to another pointer type, but it does
allow it the other way around, which is what would be happening here.
I have committed this.