On Tue, 2012-10-02 at 12:02 -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> While looking around to fix the pg_malloc(0) issue, I noticed that
> various other pieces of code such as pg_basebackup have essentially
> identical functions, except they're called xmalloc(). I propose to
> standardize all these things on this set of names:
>
> pg_malloc
> pg_malloc0 (for malloc-and-zero behavior)
> pg_calloc (randomly different API for pg_malloc0)
> pg_realloc
> pg_free
> pg_strdup
>
> Any objections?
xmalloc, xstrdup, etc. are pretty common names for functions that do
alloc-or-die (another possible naming scheme ;-) ). The naming
pg_malloc etc. on the other hand suggests that the allocation is being
done in a PostgreSQL-specific way, and anyway sounds too close to
palloc.
So I'd be more in favor of xmalloc <= pg_malloc.
