On Fri, 2013-04-05 at 18:14 -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> Since gcc 4.8 is going to be on a lot of people's machines pretty
> soon,
> I think we need to do something to prevent it from breaking 8.4.x and
> 9.0.x. It looks like our choices are (1) teach configure to enable
> -fno-aggressive-loop-optimizations if the compiler recognizes it,
> or (2) back-port commit 8137f2c32322c624e0431fac1621e8e9315202f9.
Using a fixed-size struct member as a flexible one has always been a
violation of the C standard, although a widely tolerated one. Doing
that in the middle of a struct, however, is totally wrong, and the
compiler is perfectly in its right to make a mess of it. Even flexible
array members are not allowed in the middle of a struct.
So I think this is not a compiler bug or an arms race. We just need to
fix the code. So I'm in favor of backporting.