Re: [PATCH] backend: compare word-at-a-time in bcTruelen

On Tue, Jun 16, 2009 at 6:30 AM, Stephen Frost<sfrost(at)snowman(dot)net> wrote:
> * Robert Haas (robertmhaas(at)gmail(dot)com) wrote:
>> As I look at this, another problem is that it seems to me that you're
>> assuming that VARDATA_ANY() will return an aligned pointer, which
>> isn't necessarily the case (see src/include/postgres.h).
>
> I believe you need to look at it more carefully.  I don't think it's
> making any such assumption.  Specifically, it has three loops; an "until
> we're aligned" loop, then a "while we're aligned", and a "when we've
> done all the aligned we could do".

I see that... but I don't think the test in the first loop is correct.
It's based on the value of i % 4, but I'm not convinced that you know
anything about the alignment at the point where i == 0.

I might be all wet here, I haven't looked at this area of the code in detail.

> On the flip side, I am curious as to if the arguments to a stored
> procedure are always aligned or not.  Never had a case to care before,
> but if palloc() is always going to return an aligned chunk of memory
> (per MemSetAligned in c.h) it makes me wonder.

Well, if it's char(n) for n <~ 126, it's going to have a 1-byte
varlena header...

...Robert