Re: [HACKERS] dollar quoting

Tom Lane wrote:
> Bruce Momjian <pgman(at)candle(dot)pha(dot)pa(dot)us> writes:
> > I am a little concerned about adding the overhead of lex to psql. Right
> > now, some folks have reported that lex/yacc take a considerable amount
> > of processing time in the backend as part of a query, and adding that to
> > psql just to do $$ seems questionable. Of course, we can alway test and
> > see what the overhead shows.
>
> That's not the question to ask --- the question is whether a flex lexer
> will be faster or slower than the hand-made lexing code that psql is
> currently using. Lexer generation is a well-understood art, and you
> have to be pretty tense to beat out flex with hand-made code. It's the
> same tradeoff as trying to write better assembly code than a compiler
> does. Look at the lexing loop in psql/mainloop.c (that series of
> if-tests starting at about line 250) and ask yourself if that's really
> going to beat out the state-machine implementation flex uses --- which
> looks to be about two table lookups per character, plus a switch()
> executed at the end of every token. I'll bet on flex being faster.
>
> The reason the lexer shows up in the backend is that it has to grovel
> over every individual character of a query. For sufficiently large
> query strings that's gonna take awhile no matter how you do it.
>
> But in any case, the argument for moving to flex is not about
> performance, it is about making the code more understandable and more
> certain to agree with the backend lexer.

If we go with lex/flex for psql, I would still like someone to test
performance to see that we aren't taking a big hit.

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