some Page/PageData const stuff

From: Peter Eisentraut <peter(at)eisentraut(dot)org>
To: pgsql-hackers <pgsql-hackers(at)postgresql(dot)org>
Subject: some Page/PageData const stuff
Date: 2024-12-09 15:44:14
Message-ID: 692ee0da-49da-4d32-8dca-da224cc2800e@eisentraut.org
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In [0] I wrote:

"""
I was fiddling a bit with making some Page-related APIs const-proof,
which might involve changing something like "Page p" to "const PageData
*p", but I was surprised that a type PageData exists but it's an
unrelated type local to generic_xlog.c.

This patch renames that type to a more specific name
[GenericXLogPageData]. This makes room for possibly adding another
PageData type with the earlier meaning, but that's not done here.

"""

[0]:
https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/flat/001d457e-c118-4219-8132-e1846c2ae3c9%40eisentraut.org

This is now the follow-up that adds back PageData with the earlier
meaning and updates a few of the Page-related APIs to be const-proof.
That is all pretty straightforward, except one inline function that had
to be changed back to a macro, because it is used in a way that
sometimes it takes const and returns const and sometimes takes non-const
and returns non-const. (We might be able to do that kind of thing
better with C23 in N years. ;-) )

Just a thought, I've been thinking it might be neat if PageData were
actually defined something like this:

typedef struct PageData
{
union
{
PageHeaderData phdr;
PGAlignedBlock data;
};
} PageData;

Then you could write all those (PageHeader) casts in a more elegant way,
and you don't get to randomly mix char * and Page, which has very weak
type safety. But this currently totally breaks, because many places
assume you can do char-based pointer arithmetic with Page values. So
this would need further analysis.

Attachment Content-Type Size
0001-Add-PageData.patch text/plain 699 bytes
0002-Add-const-qualifiers-to-bufpage.h.patch text/plain 10.8 KB
0003-Add-more-use-of-Page-PageData-rather-than-char.patch text/plain 4.2 KB

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