Re: undersized unions

On Sun, Feb 5, 2023 at 6:28 AM Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de> wrote:
> On the other hand, it also just seems risky from a code writing perspective. It's not immediate obvious that it'd be
unsafeto create an on-stack Numeric by assigning *ptr. But it is.
 

Well, I think that is pretty obvious: we have lots of things that are
essentially variable-length types, and you can't put any of them on
the stack.

But I do also think that the Numeric situation is messier than some
others we have got, and that's partly my fault, and it would be nice
to make it better.

I do not really know exactly how to do that, though. Our usual pattern
is to just have a struct and end with a variable-length array, or
alternatively add a comment says "other stuff follows!" at the end of
the struct definition, without doing anything that C knows about at
all. But here it's more complicated: there's a uint16 value for sure,
and then maybe an int16 value, and then some number of NumericDigit
values. That "maybe an int16 value" part is not something that C has a
built-in way of representing, to my knowledge, which is why we end up
with this hackish thing.

--
Robert Haas
EDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com