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The only real argument for using malloc directly was that we needed the ability to not throw error on OOM; but mcxt.c grew that feature awhile ago. Keeping the data in a memory context improves accountability and debuggability --- for example, without this it's almost impossible to detect memory leaks in the GUC code with anything less costly than valgrind. Moreover, the next patch in this series will add a hash table for GUC lookup, and it'd be pretty silly to be using palloc-dependent hash facilities alongside malloc'd storage of the underlying data. This is a bit invasive though, in particular causing an API break for GUC check hooks that want to modify the GUC's value or use an "extra" data structure. They must now use guc_malloc() and guc_free() instead of malloc() and free(). Failure to change affected code will result in assertion failures or worse; but thanks to recent effort in the mcxt infrastructure, it shouldn't be too hard to diagnose such oversights (at least in assert-enabled builds). One note is that this changes ParseLongOption() to return short-lived palloc'd not malloc'd data. There wasn't any caller for which the previous definition was better. Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/2982579.1662416866@sss.pgh.pa.us
PostgreSQL Database Management System ===================================== This directory contains the source code distribution of the PostgreSQL database management system. PostgreSQL is an advanced object-relational database management system that supports an extended subset of the SQL standard, including transactions, foreign keys, subqueries, triggers, user-defined types and functions. This distribution also contains C language bindings. PostgreSQL has many language interfaces, many of which are listed here: https://www.postgresql.org/download/ See the file INSTALL for instructions on how to build and install PostgreSQL. That file also lists supported operating systems and hardware platforms and contains information regarding any other software packages that are required to build or run the PostgreSQL system. Copyright and license information can be found in the file COPYRIGHT. A comprehensive documentation set is included in this distribution; it can be read as described in the installation instructions. The latest version of this software may be obtained at https://www.postgresql.org/download/. For more information look at our web site located at https://www.postgresql.org/.