Re: Safe memory allocation functions

On Thu, Jan 15, 2015 at 10:57 AM, Alvaro Herrera
<alvherre@2ndquadrant.com> wrote:
>> Hmm, I understood Tom to be opposing the idea of a palloc variant that
>> returns NULL on failure, and I understand you to be supporting it.
>> But maybe I'm confused.
>
> Your understanding seems correct to me.  I was just saying that your
> description of Tom's argument to dislike the idea seemed at odds with
> what he was actually saying.

OK, that may be.  I'm not sure.

>> Anyway, I support it.  I agree that there are
>> systems (or circumstances?) where malloc is going to succeed and then
>> the world will blow up later on anyway, but I don't think that means
>> that an out-of-memory error is the only sensible response to a palloc
>> failure; returning NULL seems like a sometimes-useful alternative.
>>
>> I do think that "safe" is the wrong suffix.  Maybe palloc_soft_fail()
>> or palloc_null() or palloc_no_oom() or palloc_unsafe().
>
> I liked palloc_noerror() better myself FWIW.

I don't care for noerror() because it probably still will error in
some circumstances; just not for OOM.

-- 
Robert Haas
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