Re: making the backend's json parser work in frontend code

From: Tom Lane <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us>
To: Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com>
Cc: Mahendra Singh Thalor <mahi6run(at)gmail(dot)com>, Mark Dilger <mark(dot)dilger(at)enterprisedb(dot)com>, Andrew Dunstan <andrew(dot)dunstan(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com>, David Steele <david(at)pgmasters(dot)net>, "pgsql-hackers(at)postgresql(dot)org" <pgsql-hackers(at)postgresql(dot)org>
Subject: Re: making the backend's json parser work in frontend code
Date: 2020-01-28 18:32:26
Message-ID: 18144.1580236346@sss.pgh.pa.us
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I wrote:
> Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
>> Is the example of CreateDestReceiver() sufficient to show that this is
>> not a problem in practice?

> Dunno. I don't see any warnings about that in the buildfarm, but
> that's not a very large sample of non-gcc compilers.

BTW, now that I think about it, CreateDestReceiver is not up to project
standards anyway, in that it fails to provide reasonable behavior in
the case where what's passed is not a legal value of the enum.
What you'll get, if you're lucky, is a SIGABRT crash with no
indication of the cause --- or if you're not lucky, some very
hard-to-debug crash elsewhere as a result of the function returning
a garbage pointer. So independently of whether the current coding
suppresses compiler warnings reliably, I think we ought to replace it
with elog()-and-return-NULL. Admittedly, that's wasting a few bytes
on a case that should never happen ... but we haven't ever hesitated
to do that elsewhere, if it'd make the problem more diagnosable.

IOW, there's a good reason why there are exactly no other uses
of that coding pattern.

regards, tom lane

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