The immediate impetus for this is that Noah Misch's patch to elide
unnecessary table and index rebuilds when changing typmod for temporal
types uses it; and this is extracted from that patch, with some
further commentary by me. But it seems logically separate from the
remainder of the patch, so I'm committing it separately; this is not
the first time someone has wanted fls() in the backend and probably
won't be the last.
If we end up using this in more performance-critical spots it may be
worthwhile to add some architecture-specific optimizations to our
src/port version of fls() - e.g. any x86 platform can implement this
using the assembly instruction BSRL. But performance won't matter
a bit for assessing typmod changes, so I'm not worried about that
right now.
Bruce Momjian
Heikki Linnakangas
Robert Haas