There's plenty places in frontend code that could benefit from a
string buffer implementation. Some because it yields simpler and
faster code, and some others because of the desire to share code
between backend and frontend.
While there is a string buffer implementation available to frontend
code, libpq's PQExpBuffer, it is clunkier than stringinfo, it
introduces a libpq dependency, doesn't allow for sharing between
frontend and backend code, and has a higher API/ABI stability
requirement due to being exposed via libpq.
Therefore it seems best to just making StringInfo being usable by
frontend code. There's not much to do for that, except for rewriting
two subsequent elog/ereport calls into others types of error
reporting, and deciding on a maximum string length.
For the maximum string size I decided to privately define MaxAllocSize
to the same value as used in the backend. It seems likely that we'll
want to reconsider this for both backend and frontend code in the not
too far away future.
For now I've left stringinfo.h in lib/, rather than common/, to reduce
the likelihood of unnecessary breakage. We could alternatively decide
to provide a redirecting stringinfo.h in lib/, or just not provide
compatibility.
Author: Andres Freund
Reviewed-By: Kyotaro Horiguchi, Daniel Gustafsson
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20190920051857.2fhnvhvx4qdddviz@alap3.anarazel.de
Peter Eisentraut
Bruce Momjian
Andres Freund