The original coding in contrib/uuid-ossp created and destroyed a uuid_t
object (or, in some cases, even two of them) each time it was called.
This is not the intended usage: you're supposed to keep the uuid_t object
around so that the library can cache its state across uses. (Other UUID
libraries seem to keep equivalent state behind-the-scenes in static
variables, but OSSP chose differently.) Aside from being quite inefficient,
creating a new uuid_t loses knowledge of the previously generated UUID,
which in theory could result in duplicate V1-style UUIDs being created
on sufficiently fast machines.
On at least some platforms, creating a new uuid_t also draws some entropy
from /dev/urandom, leaving less for the rest of the system. This seems
sufficiently unpleasant to justify back-patching this change.
strings. This patch introduces four support functions cstring_to_text,
cstring_to_text_with_len, text_to_cstring, and text_to_cstring_buffer, and
two macros CStringGetTextDatum and TextDatumGetCString. A number of
existing macros that provided variants on these themes were removed.
Most of the places that need to make such conversions now require just one
function or macro call, in place of the multiple notational layers that used
to be needed. There are no longer any direct calls of textout or textin,
and we got most of the places that were using handmade conversions via
memcpy (there may be a few still lurking, though).
This commit doesn't make any serious effort to eliminate transient memory
leaks caused by detoasting toasted text objects before they reach
text_to_cstring. We changed PG_GETARG_TEXT_P to PG_GETARG_TEXT_PP in a few
places where it was easy, but much more could be done.
Brendan Jurd and Tom Lane
