[nemothekid]

For what I understand in the docs, in postgres at least, VARCHAR and TEXT are the same thing, and CHAR actually has the performance hit.

[colanderman]

They are implemented the same, but they aren't the same type. Notably, each parameterization of varchar (or char) is its own type. This can cause issues when trying to change the length parameter. For this reason I prefer to use TEXT with a CHECK constraint.