Re: Performance improvements for src/port/snprintf.c

Hi,

On 2018-10-03 12:54:52 -0400, Tom Lane wrote:
> Andres Freund <andres@anarazel.de> writes:
> > It seems the general "use strfromd if available" approach is generally
> > useful, even if we need to serialize the precision.
> 
> Agreed.
> 
> > Putting it into an
> > inline appears to be helpful, avoids some of the otherwise precision
> > related branches.  Do you have any feelings about which header to put
> > the code in?  I used common/string.h so far.
> 
> I do not think it should be in a header, for two reasons:
> 
> (1) The need to use sprintf for portability means that we need very
> tight constraints on the precision spec *and* the buffer size *and*
> the format type (%f pretty much destroys certainty about how long the
> output string is).  So this isn't going to be general purpose code.
> I think just writing it into float[48]out is sufficient.

Well, the numbers suggest it's also useful to do so from snprintf - it's
not that rare that we output floating point numbers from semi
performance critical code, even leaving aside float[48]out.  So I'm not
convinced that we shouldn't do this from within snprintf.c too. Now we
could open-code it twice, but i'm not sure I see the point.

If we just define the API as having to guarantee there's enough space
for the output format, I think it'll work well enough for now?
snprintf.c already assumes everything floating point can be output in
1024 chars, no?

Greetings,

Andres Freund