Re: pg_stat_bgwriter.buffers_backend is pretty meaningless (and more?)

On Mon, Feb 27, 2023 at 10:30 AM Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
>
> Melanie Plageman <melanieplageman@gmail.com> writes:
> > Attached is a patch to remove the *_FIRST macros.
> > I was going to add in code to change
>
> >     for (IOObject io_object = 0; io_object < IOOBJECT_NUM_TYPES; io_object++)
> >     to
> >     for (IOObject io_object = 0; (int) io_object < IOOBJECT_NUM_TYPES; io_object++)
>
> I don't really like that proposal.  ISTM it's just silencing the
> messenger rather than addressing the underlying problem, namely that
> there's no guarantee that an IOObject variable can hold the value
> IOOBJECT_NUM_TYPES, which it had better do if you want the loop to
> terminate.  Admittedly it's quite unlikely that these three enums would
> grow to the point that that becomes an actual hazard for them --- but
> IMO it's still bad practice and a bad precedent for future code.

That's fair. Patch attached.

> > but then I couldn't remember why we didn't just do
>
> >     for (int io_object = 0; io_object < IOOBJECT_NUM_TYPES; io_object++)
>
> > I recall that when passing that loop variable into a function I was
> > getting a compiler warning that required me to cast the value back to an
> > enum to silence it:
>
> >             pgstat_tracks_io_op(bktype, (IOObject) io_object,
> > io_context, io_op))
>
> > However, I am now unable to reproduce that warning.
> > Moreover, I see in cases like table_block_relation_size() with
> > ForkNumber, the variable i is passed with no cast to smgrnblocks().
>
> Yeah, my druthers would be to just do it the way we do comparable
> things with ForkNumber.  I don't feel like we need to invent a
> better way here.
>
> The risk of needing to cast when using the "int" loop variable
> as an enum is obviously the downside of that approach, but we have
> not seen any indication that any compilers actually do warn.
> It's interesting that you did see such a warning ... I wonder which
> compiler you were using at the time?

so, pretty much any version of clang I tried with
-Wsign-conversion produces a warning.

<source>:35:32: warning: implicit conversion changes signedness: 'int'
to 'IOOp' (aka 'enum IOOp') [-Wsign-conversion]

I didn't do the casts in the attached patch since they aren't done elsewhere.

- Melanie