It may not be surprising that there’s been a few projects over the years that I’ve worked on where we’ve had to care about stack usage (to varying degrees).

For threaded userspace applications (e.g. MySQL, Drizzle) you get a certain amount of stack per thread – and you really don’t want to bust that. For a great many years now, there’s been both a configuration parameter in MySQL to set how much stack each thread (connection) gets as well as various checks in the source code to ensure there’s enough free stack to do a particular operation (IIRC open_table is the most hairy one of this in MySQL).

For the Linux Kernel, stack usage is a relatively (in)famous problem… although by now just about every real problem has been fixed and merely mentioning it is probably just the influence of the odd grey beard hairs I’m pretending not to notice.

In a current project I’m working on, it’s also something we have …

What do you think of this piece of C code?

  void foo(long v) {
    unsigned long u;
    unsigned sign;
    if (v < 0) {
      u = -v;
      sign = 1;
    } else {
      u = v;
      sign = 0;
    }
    ...

Seems pretty simple, right? Then what do you think of this output from MySQL:

  mysql> create table t1 (a bigint) as select '-9223372036854775807.5' as a;
  mysql> select * from t1;
  +----------------------+
  | a                    |
  +----------------------+
  | -'..--).0-*(+,))+(0( | 
  +----------------------+

Yes, that is authentic output from older versions of MySQL. Not just the wrong number, the output is complete garbage! This is my all-time favorite MySQL bug#31799. It was caused by code like the above C snippet.

So can you spot what is wrong with the code? Looks pretty simple, does it not? But the title of this post …

Yesterday, I reached a happy milestone in HailDB development. All compiler warnings left in the api/ directory (the public interface to the database engine) are now either probable/possible bugs (that we need to look at closely) or are warnings due to unfinished code (that we should finish).

There’s still a bunch of compiler warnings that we’ve inherited (HailDB compiles with lots of warnings enabled) that we have to get through, but a lot will wait until after we update the core to be based on InnoDB 1.1.