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由 Tom Lane 提交于
to suppress zero-padding of "name" entries in indexes. The alignment change is unlikely to save any space, but it is really needed anyway to make the world safe for our widespread practice of passing plain old C strings to functions that are declared as taking Name. In the previous coding, the C compiler was entitled to assume that a Name pointer was word-aligned; but we were failing to guarantee that. I think the reason we'd not seen failures is that usually the only thing that gets done with such a pointer is strcmp(), which is hard to optimize in a way that exploits word-alignment. Still, some enterprising compiler guy will probably think of a way eventually, or we might change our code in a way that exposes more-obvious optimization opportunities. The padding change is accomplished in one-liner fashion by declaring the "name" index opclasses to use storage type "cstring" in pg_opclass.h. Normally btree and hash don't allow a nondefault storage type, because they don't have any provisions for converting the input datum to another type. However, because name and cstring are effectively the same thing except for padding, no conversion is needed --- we only need index_form_tuple() to treat the datum as being cstring not name, and this is sufficient. This seems to make for about a one-third reduction in the typical sizes of system catalog indexes that involve "name" columns, of which we have many. These two changes are only weakly related, but the alignment change makes me feel safer that the padding change won't introduce problems, so I'm committing them together.
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