Comment by yencabulator
5 months ago
The project history goes back to 1982. There may have been rewrites in the later 80s, but it's some of the oldest C around, and a very conservative codebase (e.g. Linux kernel gets much more aggressive refactorings regularly).
That particular git repository has history imported from 1996 onward, but Postgres was a very established project by then: https://git.postgresql.org/gitweb/?p=postgresql.git;a=commit...
These days people might not blink an eye at gofmt/rustfmt rewriting the AST to clean it up, but those toolchains were built that way largley because automating anything about large C codebases is so hard.
Except this was new code.
Generally, large C projects have their own style that is followed whether the code is new or not.
And thus it’s surprising to me they haven’t changed their style moving forward when it’s known that this is error prone.
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