Hi, On 2018-08-29 18:51:24 -0400, Tom Lane wrote: > I agree that assuming that they're physically zeroes is OK from a > portability standpoint, because we'd have a whole lot of other issues > if they weren't. But I have a different point to make, which is that > it's fairly standard practice for us to initialize all fields of a struct > explicitly, even when setting them to zero/false/NULL. I don't think we > should walk away from that practice just because C99 offers a shiny new > syntax for doing so. > > The main practical advantage I see to writing such "redundant" explicit > field initializations is that it aids greppability: when you're adding a > new field Y beside field X, grepping for X is a good way of finding the > places where you need to initialize/copy/write/read/generically-frob Y > too. Omitting mention of X just because you're implicitly initializing > it puts a big hole in the reliability of that technique.
FWIW, I think this has for bigger costs than gains. You can't rely on it being done everywhere anyway - there's *heaps* of places were we don't set all members - and it makes changing fieldnames etc. way more verbose than it has to be. Greetings, Andres Freund
