There were various places in our codebase which conjured up a StringInfo
by manually assigning the StringInfo fields and setting the data field
to point to some existing buffer. There wasn't much consistency here as
to what fields like maxlen got set to and in one location we didn't
correctly ensure that the buffer was correctly NUL terminated at len
bytes, as per what was documented as required in stringinfo.h
Here we introduce 2 new functions to initialize StringInfos. One allows
callers to initialize a StringInfo passing along a buffer that is
already allocated by palloc. Here the StringInfo code uses this buffer
directly rather than doing any memcpying into a new allocation. Having
this as a function allows us to verify the buffer is correctly NUL
terminated. StringInfos initialized this way can be appended to and
reset just like any other normal StringInfo.
The other new initialization function also accepts an existing buffer,
but the given buffer does not need to be a pointer to a palloc'd chunk.
This buffer could be a pointer pointing partway into some palloc'd chunk
or may not even be palloc'd at all. StringInfos initialized this way
are deemed as "read-only". This means that it's not possible to
append to them or reset them.
For the latter of the two new initialization functions mentioned above,
we relax the requirement that the data buffer must be NUL terminated.
Relaxing this requirement is convenient in a few places as it can save
us from having to allocate an entire new buffer just to add the NUL
terminator or save us from having to temporarily add a NUL only to have to
put the original char back again later.
Incompatibility note:
Here we also forego adding the NUL in a few places where it does not
seem to be required. These locations are passing the given StringInfo
into a type's receive function. It does not seem like any of our
built-in receive functions require this, but perhaps there's some UDT
out there in the wild which does require this. It is likely worthy of
a mention in the release notes that a UDT's receive function mustn't rely
on the input StringInfo being NUL terminated.
Author: David Rowley
Reviewed-by: Tom Lane
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CAApHDvorfO3iBZ%3DxpiZvp3uHtJVLyFaPBSvcAhAq2HPLnaNSwQ%40mail.gmail.com
This adjusts a few places which were appending a string constant
containing spaces onto a StringInfo. We have appendStringInfoSpaces for
that job, so let's use that instead.
For the change to jsonb.c's add_indent() function, appendStringInfoString
was being called inside a loop to append 4 spaces on each loop. This
meant that enlargeStringInfo would get called once per loop. Here it
should be much more efficient to get rid of the loop and just calculate
the number of spaces with "level * 4" and just append all the spaces in
one go.
Here we additionally adjust the appendStringInfoSpaces function so it
makes use of memset rather than a while loop to apply the required spaces
to the StringInfo. One of the problems with the while loop was that it
was incrementing one variable and decrementing another variable once per
loop. That's more work than what's required to get the job done. We may
as well use memset for this rather than trying to optimize the existing
loop. Some testing has shown memset is faster even for very small sizes.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/CAApHDvp_rKkvwudBKgBHniNRg67bzXVjyvVKfX0G2zS967K43A@mail.gmail.com
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
Bruce Momjian
David Rowley
Peter Eisentraut
Andres Freund