There's several reasons for this change:
1) It reduces the total size of TupleTableSlot / reduces alignment
padding, making the commonly accessed members fit into a single
cacheline (but we currently do not force proper alignment, so
that's not yet guaranteed to be helpful)
2) Combining the booleans into a flag allows to combine read/writes
from memory.
3) With the upcoming slot abstraction changes, it allows to have core
and extended flags, in a memory efficient way.
Author: Ashutosh Bapat and Andres Freund
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/20180220224318.gw4oe5jadhpmcdnm@alap3.anarazel.de
Andres Freund