Feedback-ID: i0fe9450f:Fastmail
Date: Wed, 8 Jul 2026 07:58:14 +0900
From: Michael Paquier <michael@paquier.xyz>
To: Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us>
Cc: Peter Eisentraut <peter@eisentraut.org>,
	Tristan Partin <tristan@partin.io>,
	pgsql-hackers <pgsql-hackers@postgresql.org>
Subject: Re: Add malloc attribute to memory allocation functions
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On Tue, Jul 07, 2026 at 11:53:36AM -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> There are still places that I'd expect to be trouble.  For example,
> Coverity has never understood the pattern we use in pg_dump's data
> collection subroutines, ie, malloc a big array of structs, fill
> the individual structs and insert pointers to them into the hash
> tables, done.  It always thinks we leaked the array, and I suspect
> tools like this will too.  In Coverity's case there's enough
> infrastructure to dismiss individual false-positive complaints,
> and then it won't bug you about them (until somebody changes the
> relevant code enough that the dismissal doesn't match :-().  Unless
> there's some similar way to silence individual reports, I don't
> foresee tools like this to be usable.  We're not going to change
> coding patterns like that one just because some static analyzer
> doesn't understand them.

Additional question.  Does this help with requirements like the one
listed in fe-exec.c for PQfreemem() under WIN32?  If the answer to
this question is yes, then it would sound like a win for me, we'd had
our share of issues in the past where we would use a free() call that
interacts with an allocation done in a completely different context
library-wise.  That's something WIN32 cares a lot about, to mention
one place.
--
Michael

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