This patch reduces pg_am to just two columns, a name and a handler
function. All the data formerly obtained from pg_am is now provided
in a C struct returned by the handler function. This is similar to
the designs we've adopted for FDWs and tablesample methods. There
are multiple advantages. For one, the index AM's support functions
are now simple C functions, making them faster to call and much less
error-prone, since the C compiler can now check function signatures.
For another, this will make it far more practical to define index access
methods in installable extensions.
A disadvantage is that SQL-level code can no longer see attributes
of index AMs; in particular, some of the crosschecks in the opr_sanity
regression test are no longer possible from SQL. We've addressed that
by adding a facility for the index AM to perform such checks instead.
(Much more could be done in that line, but for now we're content if the
amvalidate functions more or less replace what opr_sanity used to do.)
We might also want to expose some sort of reporting functionality, but
this patch doesn't do that.
Alexander Korotkov, reviewed by Petr Jelínek, and rather heavily
editorialized on by me.
So far we have worked around the fact that some very old compilers do
not support 'inline' functions by only using inline functions
conditionally (or not at all). Since such compilers are very rare by
now, we have decided to rely on inline functions from 9.6 onwards.
To avoid breaking these old compilers inline is defined away when not
supported. That'll cause "function x defined but not used" type of
warnings, but since nobody develops on such compilers anymore that's
ok.
This change in policy will allow us to more easily employ inline
functions.
I chose to remove code previously conditional on PG_USE_INLINE as it
seemed confusing to have code dependent on a define that's always
defined.
Blacklisting of compilers, like in c53f73879f, now has to be done
differently. A platform template can define PG_FORCE_DISABLE_INLINE to
force inline to be defined empty.
Discussion: 20150701161447.GB30708@awork2.anarazel.de
This could be useful for datatypes like text, where we might want
to optimize for some collations but not others. However, this patch
doesn't introduce any new sortsupport functions that work this way;
it merely revises the code so that future patches may do so.
Patch by me. Review by Peter Geoghegan.
We already had those, but they forced modules to spell out the function
bodies twice. Eliminate some duplicates we had already grown.
Extracted from a somewhat larger patch from Andres Freund.
This patch creates an API whereby a btree index opclass can optionally
provide non-SQL-callable support functions for sorting. In the initial
patch, we only use this to provide a directly-callable comparator function,
which can be invoked with a bit less overhead than the traditional
SQL-callable comparator. While that should be of value in itself, the real
reason for doing this is to provide a datatype-extensible framework for
more aggressive optimizations, as in Peter Geoghegan's recent work.
Robert Haas and Tom Lane