Re: Use C99 designated initializers for some structs

Hi,

On 2018-08-29 18:51:24 -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> I agree that assuming that they're physically zeroes is OK from a
> portability standpoint, because we'd have a whole lot of other issues
> if they weren't. But I have a different point to make, which is that
> it's fairly standard practice for us to initialize all fields of a struct
> explicitly, even when setting them to zero/false/NULL. I don't think we
> should walk away from that practice just because C99 offers a shiny new
> syntax for doing so.
>
> The main practical advantage I see to writing such "redundant" explicit
> field initializations is that it aids greppability: when you're adding a
> new field Y beside field X, grepping for X is a good way of finding the
> places where you need to initialize/copy/write/read/generically-frob Y
> too. Omitting mention of X just because you're implicitly initializing
> it puts a big hole in the reliability of that technique.

FWIW, I think this has for bigger costs than gains. You can't rely on
it being done everywhere anyway - there's *heaps* of places were we
don't set all members - and it makes changing fieldnames etc. way more
verbose than it has to be.

Greetings,

Andres Freund