• Tom Lane's avatar
    Avoid using lcons and list_delete_first where it's easy to do so. · d97b714a
    Tom Lane authored
    Formerly, lcons was about the same speed as lappend, but with the new
    List implementation, that's not so; with a long List, data movement
    imposes an O(N) cost on lcons and list_delete_first, but not lappend.
    
    Hence, invent list_delete_last with semantics parallel to
    list_delete_first (but O(1) cost), and change various places to use
    lappend and list_delete_last where this can be done without much
    violence to the code logic.
    
    There are quite a few places that construct result lists using lcons not
    lappend.  Some have semantic rationales for that; I added comments about
    it to a couple that didn't have them already.  In many such places though,
    I think the coding is that way only because back in the dark ages lcons
    was faster than lappend.  Hence, switch to lappend where this can be done
    without causing semantic changes.
    
    In ExecInitExprRec(), this results in aggregates and window functions that
    are in the same plan node being executed in a different order than before.
    Generally, the executions of such functions ought to be independent of
    each other, so this shouldn't result in visibly different query results.
    But if you push it, as one regression test case does, you can show that
    the order is different.  The new order seems saner; it's closer to
    the order of the functions in the query text.  And we never documented
    or promised anything about this, anyway.
    
    Also, in gistfinishsplit(), don't bother building a reverse-order list;
    it's easy now to iterate backwards through the original list.
    
    It'd be possible to go further towards removing uses of lcons and
    list_delete_first, but it'd require more extensive logic changes,
    and I'm not convinced it's worth it.  Most of the remaining uses
    deal with queues that probably never get long enough to be worth
    sweating over.  (Actually, I doubt that any of the changes in this
    patch will have measurable performance effects either.  But better
    to have good examples than bad ones in the code base.)
    
    Patch by me, thanks to David Rowley and Daniel Gustafsson for review.
    
    Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/21272.1563318411@sss.pgh.pa.us
    d97b714a
cluster.c 50.9 KB