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Date: Wed, 25 Mar 2026 17:27:34 +0100
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Subject: Re: remove bits* types
To: Nathan Bossart <nathandbossart@gmail.com>,
 Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de>
Cc: =?UTF-8?Q?=C3=81lvaro_Herrera?= <alvherre@kurilemu.de>,
 Pg Hackers <pgsql-hackers@lists.postgresql.org>
References: <absbX33E4eaA0Ity@nathan>
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From: Peter Eisentraut <peter@eisentraut.org>
In-Reply-To: <absbX33E4eaA0Ity@nathan>
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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.