Re: Proposal: Make use of C99 designated initialisers for nulls/values arrays

Hi,

On 2019-10-04 17:08:29 -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> Andres Freund <andres(at)anarazel(dot)de> writes:
> > On 2019-10-04 16:31:29 -0400, Bruce Momjian wrote:
> >> Yeah, it is certainly weird that you have to assign the first array
> >> element to get the rest to be zeros. By using a macro, we can document
> >> this behavior in one place.
>
> > IDK, to me this seems like something one just has to learn about C, with
> > the macro just obfuscating that already required knowledge. It's not
> > like this only applies to stack variables initializes with {0}. It's
> > also true of global variables, or function-local static ones, for
> > example.
>
> Huh? For both those cases, the *default* behavior, going back to K&R C,
> is that the variable initializes to all-bits-zero. There's no need to
> write anything extra.

What I mean is that if there's any initialization, it's to all zeroes,
except for the parts explicitly initialized explicitly. And all that the
{0} does, is that the rest of the fields are initialized the way other
such initialization happens.

There's plenty places where we don't initialize every part, e.g. a
struct member, of global variables (and for stack allocated data as
well, increasingly so). To be able to make sense of things like
somevar = {.foo = bar /* field blub is not initialized */};
or things like guc.c - where we rely on zero initialize most fields of
config_generic.

> If some people are writing {0} there, I think
> we should discourage that on the grounds that it results in inconsistent
> coding style.

Yea, I'm not advocating that.

Greetings,

Andres Freund