Re: Obstacles to user-defined range canonicalization functions

On Nov 23, 2011, at 10:33 PM, Tom Lane wrote:

> Now you could argue that for performance reasons everybody should write
> their canonicalization functions in C anyway, but I'm not sure I buy
> that --- at the very least, it'd be nice to write the functions in
> something higher-level while prototyping.

I would apply this argument to every single part of the system that requires code that extends the database to be written in C, including:

* I/O functions (for custom data types)
* tsearch parsers
* use of RECORD arguments

And probably many others. There are a *lot* of problems I’d love to be able to solve with prototypes written in PLs other than C, and in small databases (there are a lot of them out there), they may remain the production solutions.

So I buy the argument in the case of creating range canonicalization functions, too, of course!

Best,

David