On Fri, Jan 12, 2024 at 5:32 AM Alvaro Herrera <alvhe...@alvh.no-ip.org> wrote: > On 2024-Jan-11, Alvaro Herrera wrote: > > If you look closely at InsertPgAttributeTuples and accompanying code, it > > all looks a bit archaic. They seem to be treating TupleDesc as a > > glorified array of Form_pg_attribute elements in a convenient packaging. > > It's probably cleaner to change these APIs so that they deal with a > > Form_pg_attribute array, and not TupleDesc anymore. But we can hack on > > that some other day. > > In addition, it also occurs to me now that maybe it would make sense to > change the TupleDesc implementation to use a List of Form_pg_attribute > instead of an array, and do away with ->natts. This would let us change > all "for ( ... natts ...)" loops into foreach_ptr() loops ... there are > only five hundred of them or so --rolls eyes--.
Open-coding stuff like this can easily work out to a loss, and I personally think we're overly dependent on List. It's not a particularly good abstraction, IMHO, and if we do a lot of work to start using it everywhere because a list is really an array, then what happens when somebody decides that a list really ought to be a skip-list, or a hash table, or some other crazy thing? -- Robert Haas EDB: http://www.enterprisedb.com
