Re: [PATCH 2/5] Make relpathbackend return a statically result instead of palloc()'ing it

Robert Haas <robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com> writes:
> And functions that return static buffers are evil incarnate. I've
> spent way too much of my life dealing with the supreme idiocy that is
> fmtId(). If someone ever finds a way to make that go away, I will buy
> them a beverage of their choice at the next conference we're both at.

Yeah, that was exactly the case that was top-of-mind when I was
complaining about static return buffers upthread.

It's not hard to make the ugliness go away: just let it strdup its
return value. The problem is that in the vast majority of usages it
wouldn't be convenient to free the result, so we'd have a good deal
of memory leakage. What might be interesting is to instrument it to
see how much (adding a counter to the function ought to be easy enough)
and then find out whether it's an amount we still care about in 2013.
Frankly, pg_dump is a memory hog already - a few more identifier-sized
strings laying about might not matter anymore.

(Wanders away wondering how many relpathbackend callers bother to free
its result, and whether that matters either ...)

regards, tom lane