Re: Do we want a xmalloc or similar function in the Backend?

On Tuesday, June 19, 2012 04:38:56 PM Tom Lane wrote:
> Andres Freund <andres(at)2ndquadrant(dot)com> writes:
> > There are 70+ calls of malloc in the backend in the form of
> >
> > type* foo = malloc(sizeof(...));
> > if(!foo)
> >
> > elog(ERROR, "could not allocate memory");
> >
> > which is a bit annoying to write at times. Would somebody argue against
> > introducing a function that does the above named xmalloc() or
> > malloc_or_die()?
>
> 99% of the time, you should be using palloc if that's the behavior you
> want. I think most of the malloc calls are in places where we want a
> bit more control over the error response.
There are surprisingly many calls that just have the above logic without a
more elaborate error message. Its mostly cases which allocate memory just once
and never release it again to avoid having huge static data around for
processes not using that part of the code.
True enough, most of those could use TopMemoryContext, its a rather
established pattern not to do so in those cases though...

Andres
--
Andres Freund http://www.2ndQuadrant.com/
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