Date: Wed, 18 Mar 2026 16:38:39 -0500
From: Nathan Bossart <nathandbossart@gmail.com>
To: Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de>
Cc: =?utf-8?Q?=C3=81lvaro?= Herrera <alvherre@kurilemu.de>,
	Pg Hackers <pgsql-hackers@lists.postgresql.org>
Subject: remove bits* types
Message-ID: <absbX33E4eaA0Ity@nathan>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: multipart/mixed; boundary="raj/7xW9mFi0VuDD"
Content-Disposition: inline
Archived-At: <https://www.postgresql.org/message-id/absbX33E4eaA0Ity%40nathan>
Precedence: bulk


--raj/7xW9mFi0VuDD
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Disposition: inline

(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.

-- 
nathan

--raj/7xW9mFi0VuDD
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii
Content-Disposition: attachment; filename=v1-0001-remove-bits-types.patch