Re: Remove redundant initializations

Peter Eisentraut <peter(dot)eisentraut(at)enterprisedb(dot)com> writes:
> There are certain parts of code that laboriously initialize every field
> of a struct to (some spelling of) zero, even though the whole struct was
> just zeroed (by makeNode() or memset()) a few lines earlier.

FWIW, I think that it's an intentional style choice to explicitly
initialize every field rather than relying on makeNode to have done so.

The primary case where I personally rely on that style is when adding a
new field to a struct. Currently it's possible to grep for some existing
field and add the new one beside it. Leaving out initializations by
relying on side-effects of makeNode makes that far riskier.

A different aspect is the one you mention parenthetically, which is
what values can we rely on to be all-zero-bits? Switching to this
style will embed assumptions about that to a far greater degree than
we have now, making the code less robust against changes.

I'm aware that there are opinions to the contrary, but I do not think
this is an improvement.

regards, tom lane