Re: Manipulating complex types as non-contiguous structures in-memory

Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de> writes:
> On 2015-05-13 20:48:51 -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
>> I still think that going back to defining the second byte as the size
>> would be better.  Fortunately, since this is only a matter of in-memory
>> representations, we aren't committed to any particular answer.

> Requiring sizes to be different still strikes me as a disaster. Or is
> that not what you're proposing?

It is, but why would it be a disaster?  We could add StaticAsserts
verifying that the sizes actually are different.  I doubt that the pad
space itself could amount to any issue performance-wise, since it would
only ever exist in transient in-memory tuples, and even that only seldom.
        regards, tom lane