On Fri, Sep 01, 2023 at 04:00:44PM -0400, Robert Haas wrote: > In hindsight, I think that making binaryheap depend on Datum was a bad > idea. I think that was my idea, and I think it wasn't very smart. > Considering that people have coded to that decision up until now, it > might not be too easy to change at this point. But in principle I > guess you'd want to be able to make a heap out of any C data type, > rather than just Datum, or just Datum in the backend and just void * > in the frontend.
Yeah, something similar to simplehash for binary heaps could be nice. That being said, I don't know if there's a strong reason to specialize the implementation for a given C data type in most cases. I suspect many callers are just fine with dealing with pointers (e.g., I wouldn't store an entire TocEntry in the array), and smaller types like integers are already stored directly in the array thanks to the use of Datum. However, it _would_ allow us to abandon this frontend/backend void */Datum kludge, which is something. -- Nathan Bossart Amazon Web Services: https://aws.amazon.com
