Re: Missing errcode() in ereport

Hi,

On 2020-03-19 21:03:17 -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> I wrote:
> > I think that at least some compilers will complain about side-effect-free
> > subexpressions of a comma expression. Could we restructure things so
> > that the errcode/errmsg/etc calls form a standalone comma expression
> > rather than appearing to be arguments of a varargs function?
>
> Yeah, the attached quick-hack patch seems to work really well for
> this.

Heh, you're too fast. I just sent something similar, and a few followup
patches.

What is your thinking about pain around backpatching it might introduce?
We can't easily backpatch support for ereport-without-extra-parens, I
think, because it needs __VA_ARGS__?

> As a nice side benefit, the backend gets a couple KB smaller from
> removal of errfinish's useless dummy argument.

I don't think it's the removal of the dummy parameter itself that
constitutes most of the savings, but instead it's not having to push the
return value of errmsg(), errcode(), et al as vararg arguments.

> I think that we could now also change all the helper functions
> (errmsg et al) to return void instead of a dummy value, but that
> would make the patch a lot longer and probably not move the
> goalposts much in terms of error detection.

I did include that in my prototype patch. Agree that it's not necessary
for the error detection capability, but it seems misleading to leave the
return values around if they're not actually needed.

> It also looks like we could use the same trick to get plain elog()
> to have the behavior of not evaluating its arguments when it's
> not going to print anything. I've not poked at that yet either.

I've included a patch for that. I think it's now sufficient to
#define elog(elevel, ...) \
ereport(elevel, errmsg(__VA_ARGS__))

which imo is quite nice, as it allows us to get rid of a lot of
duplication.

Greetings,

Andres Freund