On 11/18/2010 10:33 AM, Robert Haas wrote:
> On Thu, Nov 18, 2010 at 10:24 AM, Merlin Moncure<mmoncure@gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Pavel's performance argument is imnsho valid. arrays at present are
>> the best way to pass data around functions and any optimizations here
>> are very welcome. Given that, is there any way to mitigate your
>> concerns on the syntax side?
> Can we get the performance benefit any other way? I hate to think
> that it will still be slow for people using the already-supported
> syntax.
It's not disastrously slower. AFAICT from a very quick glance over the
patch, he's getting the speedup by bypassing the normal mechanism for
evaluating "for x in select ...". So we'd have to special-case that to
trap calls to unnest in the general form. That would be pretty ugly. Or
else make unnest and SPI faster. But that's a much bigger project.
Syntactic sugar is not entirely to be despised, anyway.
cheers
andrew