Re: [HACKERS] taking stdbool.h into use

On Tue, Mar 13, 2018 at 03:25:39PM -0400, Peter Eisentraut wrote:
> After more digging, there are more problems with having a bool that is
> not 1 byte. For example, pg_control has a bool field, so with a
> different bool size, pg_control would be laid out differently. That
> would require changing all the mentions of bool to bool8 where the end
> up on disk somehow, as I had already done for the system catalog
> structures, but we don't know all the other places that would be affected.
>
> So I'm going back to my proposal from December, to just use stdbool.h
> when sizeof(bool) == 1, and add a static assertion to prevent other
> configurations.

So, on one side of the ring, we have more complicated patches to include
so as support for sizeof(bool) == 4 becomes possible in the backend
code, and on the opposite side one patch which restrains the use of
stdbool.h only when the size is 1. A size of 4 bytes for bool is
defined in stdbool.h on a small set of platforms, so it could be
tempting to use what is proposed here, still that feels like a
halk-baked integration. Thoughts from others?
--
Michael