Re: VARATT_EXTERNAL_GET_POINTER is not quite there yet

Gregory Stark <stark(at)enterprisedb(dot)com> writes:
> "Tom Lane" <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> writes:
>> I can't say that I find this a nice clean solution; but does anyone have
>> a better one?

> I'm thinking instead of having struct varlena (which you're not allowed to
> safely use any members of anyways) we should just have a typedef to void*.

I don't think we could imagine eliminating the struct name, especially
not as a back-patchable solution; there would be too many random
breakages.

It might work to change struct varlena's contents to something like

char vl_len_[4]; /* Do not touch this field directly! */
char vl_dat[1];

so that the compiler wouldn't see it as necessarily having more than
1-byte alignment. This would also not break any existing code that is
following the rules (touching vl_dat has never been stated to be
verboten).

regards, tom lane