On Wed, Oct 3, 2012 at 11:36 PM, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
> Peter Eisentraut <peter_e@gmx.net> writes:
>> 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.
>
> Meh. The fact that other people use that name is not really an
> advantage from where I sit. I'm concerned about possible name
> collisions, eg in libraries loaded into the backend.
>
> There are probably not any actual risks of collision right now, given
> that all these functions are currently in our client-side programs ---
> but it's foreseeable that we might use this same naming convention in
> more-exposed places in future. In fact, somebody was already proposing
> creating such functions in the core backend.
>
> But having said that, I'm not absolutely wedded to these names; they
> were just the majority of existing cases.
Why not split the difference and use pg_xmalloc?
As in: "PostgreSQL-special malloc that dies on failure."
--
Jon
