Thomas Munro <thomas.munro@gmail.com> writes:
> On Mon, Sep 19, 2022 at 8:57 AM Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
>> ... This is fairly annoying, in that it gives up the function
>> type safety the C committee wants to impose on us; but I really think
>> the data type safety that we're giving up in this version of the patch
>> is a worse hazard.
> But is it defined behaviour?
> https://stackoverflow.com/questions/559581/casting-a-function-pointer-to-another-type
Well, what we're talking about is substituting "void *" (which is
required to be compatible with "char *") for a struct pointer type.
Standards legalese aside, that could only be a problem if the platform
ABI handles "char *" differently from struct pointer types. The last
architecture I can remember dealing with where that might actually be
a thing was the PDP-10. Everybody has learned better since then, but
the C committee is apparently still intent on making the world safe
for crappy machine architectures.
Also, if you want to argue that "void *" is not compatible with struct
pointer types, then it's not real clear to me that we aren't full of
other spec violations, because we sure do a lot of casting across that
(and even more with this patch as it stands).
I don't have the slightest hesitation about saying that if there's
still an architecture out there that's like that, we won't support it.
I also note that our existing code in this area would break pretty
thoroughly on such a machine, so this isn't making it worse.
regards, tom lane
