Re: Make copyObject work in C++

From: David Geier <geidav(dot)pg(at)gmail(dot)com>
To: Peter Eisentraut <peter(at)eisentraut(dot)org>, Jelte Fennema-Nio <postgres(at)jeltef(dot)nl>, PostgreSQL Hackers <pgsql-hackers(at)lists(dot)postgresql(dot)org>, Thomas Munro <thomas(dot)munro(at)gmail(dot)com>
Subject: Re: Make copyObject work in C++
Date: 2025-12-08 08:33:10
Message-ID: fad7228e-a920-4ebb-973c-a48cc5066b71@gmail.com
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On 08.12.2025 08:57, Peter Eisentraut wrote:
> On 05.12.25 15:46, Jelte Fennema-Nio wrote:
>> Calling copyObject fails in C++ with an error like in most setups:
>>
>> error: use of undeclared identifier 'typeof'; did you mean 'typeid'
>>
>> This is due to the C compiler supporting used to compile postgres
>> supporting typeof, but that function actually not being present in the
>> C++ compiler. This fixes that by using decltype instead of typeof when
>> including the header in C++.
>>
>> Realized because of Thomas' not about how much of our headers should
>> work in C++, and remembering I hit this specific problem myself.
>>
>> Another approach would be to force the value of HAVE_TYPEOF to 0 if
>> __cplusplus.
>
> In the long run, I would like to change copyObject() to use
> typeof_unqual instead, because that handles qualifiers more correctly.
> (Currently, copyObject() of a const-qualified pointer results in a
> const-qualified pointer, which is nonsensical because the reason you
> made the copy is that you can modify it.)  See attached patch for an
> example.  Does C++ have something that is semantically similar to that?

Since C++11 there's std::remove_const which can be used as
std::remove_const<decltype(type)>::type.

I'm not aware of anything pre C++11, except for rolling your own variant
of std::remove_const via template specialization.

--
David Geier

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