Re: Manipulating complex types as non-contiguous structures in-memory

Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de> writes:
> On 2015-05-13 21:01:43 -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
>> It is, but why would it be a disaster?  We could add StaticAsserts
>> verifying that the sizes actually are different.  I doubt that the pad
>> space itself could amount to any issue performance-wise, since it would
>> only ever exist in transient in-memory tuples, and even that only seldom.

> The sizes would be platform dependant.

So what?  There are lots of platform-dependent constants in PG.

> It's also just incredibly ugly to
> have to add pad bytes to structures so we can disambiguate them.

Well, I agree it's not too pretty, but you were the one who brought up
the issue of the speed of VARTAG_SIZE().  We definitely gave up some
performance there already, and my patch will make it worse.

> Anyway, I think we can live with your & or my proposed additional branch
> for now. I can't see either variant being a relevant performance
> bottleneck anytime soon.

Actually, after having microbenchmarked the difference between those
two proposals, I'm not too sure that VARTAG_SIZE() is down in the noise.
But it doesn't matter for the moment --- any one of these alternatives
would be a very localized code change, and none of them would create
an on-disk compatibility break.  We can let it go until someone wants
to put together a more definitive benchmark for testing.
        regards, tom lane