Re: datum passed to macro which expects a pointer

On Sat, Apr 12, 2008 at 06:02:39PM -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> Gavin Sherry <swm(at)alcove(dot)com(dot)au> writes:
> > This may seem a little pedantic but I noticed a few places where we pass
> > a datum to a macro which treats the datum as a pointer. This works now
> > but might not in the future (if, say, Datum were to be 8 bytes).
>
> Yeah, definitely something to fix. I think though that the cases
> like this:
>
> > ! PG_RETURN_TEXT_P(DatumGetPointer(result));
>
> might as well just use PG_RETURN_DATUM instead of casting twice.

Oh of course. Updated patch attached.

>
> Was this just eyeball inspection or did you find a compiler that would
> complain about this?

I wish. It was actually thrown up when we (Greenplum) changed the macros
to be inline functions as part of changing Datum to be 8 bytes. By using
inline functions we get proper type checking from the compiler and since
we have only a small number of target platforms and architectures,
inlining isn't an issue.

Thanks,

Gavin