On 18.03.26 22:38, Nathan Bossart wrote:
(new thread)
On Wed, Mar 18, 2026 at 04:17:40PM -0500, Nathan Bossart wrote:
On Tue, Mar 17, 2026 at 05:09:49PM -0400, Andres Freund wrote:
Personally I object to the existence of the bits* types, to me they're just
noise over using the corresponding unsigned integer types. One more thing that
one has to just know what it means without there being any actual improved
type checking or such. It's not like using bits* would make it any easier to
make the underlying type a struct or such (which is different to
e.g. TransactionId, we could probably replace that with a struct without crazy
amounts of trouble).
Yeah, I don't see why you'd prefer bits32 over uint32. If anything, uint32
is probably less confusing because most hackers will have used it before.
AFAICT the bits* types are a relic of the 80s, and there used to be other
types like bool8 and word32, all of which were just uint* behind the
scenes. Those were removed in 2004 by commit ca7a1f0c86. I assume bits*
was left behind because it was still in use.
I think we should just rip the bits* types out and replace them with the
underlying types.
+1. If there seems to be consensus, I'm happy to write the patch.
Well, in the process of seeing how bad the patch would look, I ended up
writing it. I used sed for most of this, and I tried to make all necessary
manual adjustments, but I may have missed a couple.
I'm mildly in favor of removing them. But it appears there is no consensus.
