glist: _Generic wrapper for selective dlist/dclist usage

From: Matthias van de Meent <boekewurm+postgres(at)gmail(dot)com>
To: PostgreSQL Hackers <pgsql-hackers(at)lists(dot)postgresql(dot)org>
Subject: glist: _Generic wrapper for selective dlist/dclist usage
Date: 2026-09-02 11:36:12
Message-ID: CAEze2WjUs6P1QCUHij9WOnkS7CX+tvVqRiFiGdXoyevh417h4A@mail.gmail.com
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Hi,

I'd like to track the size of a dlist for data structure validation
purposes[^0]. Normally, one would use a dclist, as this tracks a
count of list elements contained therein, but because this code would
not be called in most normal production builds using a dclist would
waste precious memory.
Manually tracking the length is possible, but tedious, and a local
wrapper around the used dclist/dlist APIs (with different
implementations conditioned with #ifdefs to use the right types) would
also be a significant amount of effort, that'd be duplicated every
time .

Attached is a patch that adds glist_* macros, which wrap several
dlist/dclist_* APIs, so that developers can use dlist/dclist
selectively in different environments, without significant visual
overhead in the code. I'm planning to use this in the Proxy memory
contexts over at [1].

I've considered also adding slist_* to the macros, but I've never
needed selective slist vs dlist/dclist before, so I ignored that list
type for now.

Kind regards,

Matthias van de Meent
Databricks (https://www.databricks.com)

[^0]: This case for builds with MEMORY_CONTEXT_CHECKING, but builds
with USE_ASSERT_CHECKING or WRITE_READ_PARSE_PLAN_TREES -like options
may also want this.

[1]: https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/CAEze2WiPyruOtUOSyRUV8mQssjmYwno0M6hkxC_iUpH-=W8WcA(at)mail(dot)gmail(dot)com

Attachment Content-Type Size
v1-0001-ilist.h-Introduce-glist-convenience-macros.patch application/octet-stream 5.2 KB

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