From: Alaric Snell-Pym
Date: May 12 2009 3:37pm
Subject: Re: MySQL Reengineering Project
List-Archive: http://lists.mysql.com/internals/36640
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On 12 May 2009, at 4:16 pm, Mats Kindahl wrote:

> However, do you know of any other interfaces that work this way? I
> am personally
> not aware of any other, but then I don't know every corner of the
> code like Serg
> does. :)

Yes; when tracing up into the caller within mysql to find out why our
rnd_next's results were being ignored in joins, we found (IIRC in a
file called join.cc) the code that handles joins, which revolved
around JOIN * and JOIN_TAB * arguments being passed around, which were
also mutated; the JOIN and JOIN_TAB seemed to be initialised with the
proposed structure of the join (presumably what EXPLAIN returns), but
then also store the in-progress state of the join (storing candidate
rows).

That, combined with the fact that in my recent foray into UDFs I found
that string UDFs are passed a buffer with room for 255 characters to
put their result into, and then have the choice of using it and
returning a pointer to it or mallocing their own buffer and returning
a pointer to that (meaning that the caller, somewhere, must have code
to the effect of "if (returned_ptr != allocated_buffer)
free(returned_ptr)" to clear up, I guess?), led me to suspect that
there was an ingrained culture of functions plopping their results
into spaces left for them somewhere. Ok, there's often good reasons
for string-processing functions to put their results into preallocated
buffers, but I suspect in this case somebody originally wrote it that
way because it was the ingrained culture, and then later had to add
the ability to malloc your own buffer (wasting the pre-allocated
buffer) in order to handle strings of more than 255 characters :-)

Although I may have found the only examples of this sort of thing in a
very large and otherwise much more cleanly-structured codebase for all
I know!

ABS

--
Alaric Snell-Pym ACGI MIAP MBCS
Chief software engineer, GenieDB
alaric@stripped