In the wake of the discussion at [1] I went looking for structs that
should be using FLEXIBLE_ARRAY_MEMBER and are not, by dint of grepping
for size calculations of the form "offsetof(struct,fld) + n * sizeof(...)"
and then seeing how "fld" is declared. I haven't yet found anything
like that that I want to change, but I did come across this bit in
mvdistinct.c's statext_ndistinct_serialize():
len = VARHDRSZ + SizeOfMVNDistinct +
ndistinct->nitems * (offsetof(MVNDistinctItem, attrs) + sizeof(int));
Given the way that the subsequent code looks, I would argue that
offsetof(MVNDistinctItem, attrs) has got basically nothing to do with
this calculation, and that the right way to phrase it is just
len = VARHDRSZ + SizeOfMVNDistinct +
ndistinct->nitems * (sizeof(double) + sizeof(int));
Consider if there happened to be alignment padding in MVNDistinctItem:
as the code stands it'd overestimate the space needed. (There won't be
padding on any machine we support, I believe, so this isn't a live bug ---
but it's overcomplicated code, and could become buggy if any
less-than-double-width fields get added to MVNDistinctItem.)
For largely the same reason, I do not think that SizeOfMVNDistinct is
a helpful way to compute the space needed for those fields --- any
alignment padding that might be included is irrelevant for this purpose.
In short I'd be inclined to phrase this just as
len = VARHDRSZ + 3 * sizeof(uint32) +
ndistinct->nitems * (sizeof(double) + sizeof(int));
It looks to me actually like all the uses of both SizeOfMVNDistinctItem
and SizeOfMVNDistinct are wrong, because the code using those symbols
is really thinking about the size of this serialized representation,
which is guaranteed not to have any inter-field padding, unlike the
structs.
Thoughts?
regards, tom lane
[1] https://postgr.es/m/a620f85a-42ab-e0f3-3337-b04b97e2e2f5@redhat.com
