Re: Making empty Bitmapsets always be NULL

David Rowley <dgrowleyml@gmail.com> writes:
> On Fri, 3 Mar 2023 at 15:17, Tom Lane <tgl@sss.pgh.pa.us> wrote:
>> Another point here is that I'm pretty sure that just about all
>> bitmapsets we deal with are only one or two words, so I'm not
>> convinced you're going to get any performance win to justify
>> the added management overhead.

> It's true that the majority of Bitmapsets are going to be just 1 word,
> but it's important to acknowledge that we do suffer in some more
> extreme cases when Bitmapsets become large. Partition with large
> numbers of partitions is one such case.

Maybe, but optimizing for that while pessimizing every other case
doesn't sound very attractive from here.  I think we need some
benchmarks on normal-size bitmapsets before considering doing much
in this area.

Also, if we're going to make any sort of changes here it'd probably
behoove us to make struct Bitmapset private in bitmapset.c, so that
we can have confidence that nobody is playing games with them.
I had a go at that and was pleasantly surprised to find that
actually nobody has; the attached passes check-world.  It'd probably
be smart to commit this as a follow-on to 00b41463c, whether or not
we go any further.

Also, given that we do this, I don't think that check_bitmapset_invariants
as you propose it is worth the trouble.  The reason we've gone to such
lengths with checking List invariants is that initially we had a large
number of places doing creative and not-too-structured things with Lists,
plus we've made several absolutely fundamental changes to that data
structure.  Despite the far larger bug surface, I don't recall that those
invariant checks ever found anything after the initial rounds of changes.
So I don't buy that there's an argument for a similarly expensive set
of checks here.  bitmapset.c is small enough that we should be able to
pretty much prove it correct by eyeball.

			regards, tom lane