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Peter Dillinger 54cb9c77d9 Prefer static_cast in place of most reinterpret_cast (#12308)
Summary:
The following are risks associated with pointer-to-pointer reinterpret_cast:
* Can produce the "wrong result" (crash or memory corruption). IIRC, in theory this can happen for any up-cast or down-cast for a non-standard-layout type, though in practice would only happen for multiple inheritance cases (where the base class pointer might be "inside" the derived object). We don't use multiple inheritance a lot, but we do.
* Can mask useful compiler errors upon code change, including converting between unrelated pointer types that you are expecting to be related, and converting between pointer and scalar types unintentionally.

I can only think of some obscure cases where static_cast could be troublesome when it compiles as a replacement:
* Going through `void*` could plausibly cause unnecessary or broken pointer arithmetic. Suppose we have
`struct Derived: public Base1, public Base2`.  If we have `Derived*` -> `void*` -> `Base2*` -> `Derived*` through reinterpret casts, this could plausibly work (though technical UB) assuming the `Base2*` is not dereferenced. Changing to static cast could introduce breaking pointer arithmetic.
* Unnecessary (but safe) pointer arithmetic could arise in a case like `Derived*` -> `Base2*` -> `Derived*` where before the Base2 pointer might not have been dereferenced. This could potentially affect performance.

With some light scripting, I tried replacing pointer-to-pointer reinterpret_casts with static_cast and kept the cases that still compile. Most occurrences of reinterpret_cast have successfully been changed (except for java/ and third-party/). 294 changed, 257 remain.

A couple of related interventions included here:
* Previously Cache::Handle was not actually derived from in the implementations and just used as a `void*` stand-in with reinterpret_cast. Now there is a relationship to allow static_cast. In theory, this could introduce pointer arithmetic (as described above) but is unlikely without multiple inheritance AND non-empty Cache::Handle.
* Remove some unnecessary casts to void* as this is allowed to be implicit (for better or worse).

Most of the remaining reinterpret_casts are for converting to/from raw bytes of objects. We could consider better idioms for these patterns in follow-up work.

I wish there were a way to implement a template variant of static_cast that would only compile if no pointer arithmetic is generated, but best I can tell, this is not possible. AFAIK the best you could do is a dynamic check that the void* conversion after the static cast is unchanged.

Pull Request resolved: https://github.com/facebook/rocksdb/pull/12308

Test Plan: existing tests, CI

Reviewed By: ltamasi

Differential Revision: D53204947

Pulled By: pdillinger

fbshipit-source-id: 9de23e618263b0d5b9820f4e15966876888a16e2
2024-02-07 10:44:11 -08:00
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README.md

RocksDB: A Persistent Key-Value Store for Flash and RAM Storage

CircleCI Status

RocksDB is developed and maintained by Facebook Database Engineering Team. It is built on earlier work on LevelDB by Sanjay Ghemawat (sanjay@google.com) and Jeff Dean (jeff@google.com)

This code is a library that forms the core building block for a fast key-value server, especially suited for storing data on flash drives. It has a Log-Structured-Merge-Database (LSM) design with flexible tradeoffs between Write-Amplification-Factor (WAF), Read-Amplification-Factor (RAF) and Space-Amplification-Factor (SAF). It has multi-threaded compactions, making it especially suitable for storing multiple terabytes of data in a single database.

Start with example usage here: https://github.com/facebook/rocksdb/tree/main/examples

See the github wiki for more explanation.

The public interface is in include/. Callers should not include or rely on the details of any other header files in this package. Those internal APIs may be changed without warning.

Questions and discussions are welcome on the RocksDB Developers Public Facebook group and email list on Google Groups.

License

RocksDB is dual-licensed under both the GPLv2 (found in the COPYING file in the root directory) and Apache 2.0 License (found in the LICENSE.Apache file in the root directory). You may select, at your option, one of the above-listed licenses.