Refactor att_align_nominal() to improve performance.
Separate att_align_nominal() into two macros, similarly to what
was already done with att_align_datum() and att_align_pointer().
The inner macro att_nominal_alignby() is really just TYPEALIGN(),
while att_align_nominal() retains its previous API by mapping
TYPALIGN_xxx values to numbers of bytes to align to and then
calling att_nominal_alignby(). In support of this, split out
tupdesc.c's logic to do that mapping into a publicly visible
function typalign_to_alignby().
Having done that, we can replace performance-critical uses of
att_align_nominal() with att_nominal_alignby(), where the
typalign_to_alignby() mapping is done just once outside the loop.
In most places I settled for doing typalign_to_alignby() once
per function. We could in many places pass the alignby value
in from the caller if we wanted to change function APIs for this
purpose; but I'm a bit loath to do that, especially for exported
APIs that extensions might call. Replacing a char typalign
argument by a uint8 typalignby argument would be an API change
that compilers would fail to warn about, thus silently breaking
code in hard-to-debug ways. I did revise the APIs of array_iter_setup
and array_iter_next, moving the element type attribute arguments to
the former; if any external code uses those, the argument-count
change will cause visible compile failures.
Performance testing shows that ExecEvalScalarArrayOp is sped up by
about 10% by this change, when using a simple per-element function
such as int8eq. I did not check any of the other loops optimized
here, but it's reasonable to expect similar gains.
Although the motivation for creating this patch was to avoid a
performance loss if we add some more typalign values, it evidently
is worth doing whether that patch lands or not.
Discussion: https://postgr.es/m/
1127261.
1769649624@sss.pgh.pa.us