Re: Use outerPlanState macro instead of referring to leffttree

Richard Guo <guofenglinux@gmail.com> writes:
> In the executor code, we mix use outerPlanState macro and referring to
> leffttree. Commit 40f42d2a tried to keep the code consistent by
> replacing referring to lefftree with outerPlanState macro, but there are
> still some outliers. This patch tries to clean them up.

Seems generally reasonable, but what about righttree?  I find a few
of those too with "grep".

Backing up a little bit, one thing not to like about the outerPlanState
and innerPlanState macros is that they lose all semblance of type
safety:

#define innerPlanState(node)            (((PlanState *)(node))->righttree)
#define outerPlanState(node)            (((PlanState *)(node))->lefttree)

You can pass any pointer you want, and the compiler will not complain.
I wonder if there's any trick (even a gcc-only one) that could improve
on that.  In the absence of such a check, people might feel that
increasing our reliance on these macros isn't such a hot idea.

Now, the typical coding pattern you've used:

 ExecReScanHash(HashState *node)
 {
+       PlanState  *outerPlan = outerPlanState(node);

is probably reasonably secure against wrong-pointer slip-ups.  But
I'm less convinced about that for in-line usages in the midst of
a function, particularly in the common case that the function has
a variable pointing to its Plan node as well as PlanState node.
Would it make sense to try to use the local-variable style everywhere?

Do you mean the pattern like below?

  outerPlanState(hashstate) = ExecInitNode(outerPlan(node), estate, eflags);

It seems that this pattern is mostly used when initializing child nodes
with ExecInitNode(), and most calls to ExecInitNode() are using this
pattern as a convention. Not sure if it's better to change them to
local-variable style.

Thanks
Richard