Re: WIP: Faster Expression Processing v4

On 2017-03-22 10:41:06 -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> I've been busily hacking away on this, trying to make things cleaner and
> fix a couple of bugs I stumbled across. (Confusion between ExecQual and
> ExecCheck, for instance - we apparently lack regression tests exercising
> constraints-returning-null in corner cases such as table rewrite.) It
> will probably be a day or two more before I'm done.

Thanks!

> A couple of naming questions:
>
> * I concur with Heikki's dislike for the file name execInterpExpr.c.
> Would it make it any better to switch to execExprInterp.c? I think
> that having all this stuff under a common pattern execExpr*.c would
> be a good thing (and I notice you've already got one comment referring
> to them that way ...)

That works for me.

> * execQual.c doesn't seem to have a unifying reason to exist anymore.
> It certainly has little to do with evaluating typical qual expressions;
> what's left in there seems to be mostly concerned with SRFs. I feel
> like it might be a good idea to rename it, but to what? execExprUtils.c
> perhaps? Or maybe we should destroy it altogether, shoving the SRF
> stuff into nodeFunctionscan.c and moving what little remains into
> execUtils.c.

Yea, I was wondering about that too. What would we do with
GetAttributeByName/Num?

> * I do not like the function name ExecInstantiateExpr(). Webster's
> defines "instantiate" as "to represent (an abstraction) by a concrete
> instance", which does not seem to me to have a lot to do with what this
> function actually does.

It perhaps makes a *bit* more sense if you view it from the POV that,
with the future JIT support (WIP versions of which I posted previously),
it'd actually create a compiled function which'd largely be independent
of the of ->steps (except for the non-hotpath functions, which'd still
end up using it). So one of the above "conrete instances" would be the
interpeted version, another the compiled one. No, not an entirely
convincing argument.

> There's nothing very abstract about its input.
> More, the implication of "instantiate" is that you can instantiate any
> number of representatives of the same abstraction, but this scribbles
> on the input in a one-way fashion. I think perhaps something like
> ExecPrepareExpr or ExecFinishExpr or something along that line would
> be better, but nothing is really standing out as le mot juste.

Either of those work, but they don't strike me as perfect either, but I
can't come up with something better (ExecReadyExprForExec()?).

Greetings,

Andres Freund