Re: automatically generating node support functions

Hi,

On 2021-06-08 19:45:58 +0200, Peter Eisentraut wrote:
> On 08.06.21 15:40, David Rowley wrote:
> > It's almost 2 years ago now, but I'm wondering if you saw what Andres
> > proposed in [1]? The idea was basically to make a metadata array of
> > the node structs so that, instead of having to output large amounts of
> > .c code to do read/write/copy/equals, instead just have small
> > functions that loop over the elements in the array for the given
> > struct and perform the required operation based on the type.
>
> That project was technologically impressive, but it seemed to have
> significant hurdles to overcome before it can be useful. My proposal is
> usable and useful today. And it doesn't prevent anyone from working on a
> more sophisticated solution.

I think it's short-sighted to further and further go down the path of
parsing "kind of C" without just using a proper C parser. But leaving
that aside, a big part of the promise of the approach in that thread
isn't actually tied to the specific way the type information is
collected: The perl script could output something like the "node type
metadata" I generated in that patchset, and then we don't need the large
amount of generated code and can much more economically add additional
operations handling node types.

Greetings,

Andres Freund