Re: Something's been bugging me

Gregory Stark <stark(at)enterprisedb(dot)com> writes:
> "Tom Lane" <tgl(at)sss(dot)pgh(dot)pa(dot)us> writes:
>> Gregory Stark <stark(at)enterprisedb(dot)com> writes:
>>> Why do you cast arguments to memcmp to char* ?
>>
>> Well, *I* haven't done it in a long time,

> I'm referring to tuptoaster.c:488

Oh, I'm sorry, I thought you were talking about my hypothetical memcpy
example.

The casts in the memcmp call were because I was worried about some
compiler trying to optimize the memcmp into a word-wide operation
on the strength of the theory that struct varlena pointers must be
word-aligned. Given the later discovery about the copying problem,
those casts may be unhelpful as far as gcc is concerned; but I'm still
inclined to leave them there in case they make a difference for some
other compiler.

regards, tom lane