Re: First draft of PG 17 release notes

On Wed, 11 Sept 2024 at 16:10, Bruce Momjian <bruce(at)momjian(dot)us> wrote:
> You are right that I do mention changes specifically designed for the
> use of extensions, but there is no mention in the commit message of its
> use for extensions. In fact, I thought this was too low-level to be of
> use for extensions. However, if people feel it should be added, we have
> enough time to add it.

Another new API that is useful for extension authors is the following
one (I'm obviously biased since I'm the author, and I don't know if
there's still time):

commit 14dd0f27d7cd56ffae9ecdbe324965073d01a9ff
Author: Nathan Bossart <nathan(at)postgresql(dot)org>
Date: Thu Jan 4 16:09:34 2024 -0600

Add macros for looping through a List without a ListCell.

Many foreach loops only use the ListCell pointer to retrieve the
content of the cell, like so:

ListCell *lc;

foreach(lc, mylist)
{
int myint = lfirst_int(lc);

...
}

This commit adds a few convenience macros that automatically
declare the loop variable and retrieve the current cell's contents.
This allows us to rewrite the previous loop like this:

foreach_int(myint, mylist)
{
...
}

> An interesting idea would be
> to report all function signature changes in each major release in some
> way.

I think that might be useful, but it very much depends how long that
list gets. If it gets too long I think authors will just try to
compile and only look at the ones that break for them.