Re: POC: converting Lists into arrays

On Mon, Feb 25, 2019 at 1:31 PM Andres Freund <andres(at)anarazel(dot)de> wrote:
> > Andres said that he doesn't like the pg_list.h API. It's not pretty,
> > but is it really that bad?
>
> Yes. The function names alone confound anybody new to postgres, we tend
> to forget that after a few years. A lot of the function return types are
> basically unpredictable without reading the code, the number of builtin
> types is pretty restrictive, and there's no typesafety around the choice
> of actually stored.

But a lot of those restrictions are a consequence of needing what
amount to support functions in places as distant from pg_list.h as
pg_stat_statements.c, or the parser, or outfuncs.c. I'm not saying
that we couldn't do better here, but the design is constrained by
this. If you add a support for a new datatype, where does that leave
stored rules? Seems ticklish to me, at the very least.

--
Peter Geoghegan