With commit e24d770 in place, I took a closer look at hex_decode(), and I
concluded that doing anything better without intrinsics would likely
require either a huge lookup table or something with complexity rivalling
the instrinsics approach (while also not rivalling its performance). So, I
took a closer look at the instrinsics patches and had the following
thoughts:
* The approach looks generally reasonable to me, but IMHO the code needs
much more commentary to explain how it works.
* The functions that test the length before potentially calling a function
pointer should probably be inlined (see pg_popcount() in pg_bitutils.h).
I wouldn't be surprised if some compilers are inlining this stuff
already, but it's probably worth being explicit about it.
* Finally, I think we should ensure we've established a really strong case
for this optimization. IME these intrinsics patches require a ton of
time and energy, and the code is often extremely complex. I would be
interested to see how your bytea test compares with the improvements
added in commit e24d770 and with sending the data in binary.
--
nathan
