Prototype "improved_chk_index"

[Ian Clatworthy]

John Arbash Meinel wrote:

> However, the proof of concept came together a lot faster than I expected
> (makes me wish I had pushed for it as part of 2.0 :). And the
> performance results are pretty good, so I figured I'd share the results
> so far.

Sounds really promising. *Very* well done.

> I may not get back to this for a while. Mostly because we've stated "no
> new formats" for 2.1. So while it might be able to be a dev format, it
> would not get into active use for > 6 months.

That depends. If features like nested trees appear in the development
format prior to 2.1, it may get more use than we realise. I don't think
delaying landing stuff into the development format is a good idea.
Historically, it's taken some time to bed down performance-related
changes, partly because it takes a long time to QA the changes on lots
of operations across lots of data sets. The game "whack-a-mole" springs
to mind.

If you have changes suitable for the development format, I'd prefer to
see them land when they are ready - with a preference for early in the
cycle over later. If nothing else, it helps me when benchmarking to have
the development format reflecting our latest and greatest. If we still
suck on certain data sets, at least I can detect that and communicate it
rather than hoping pending changes will improve things.

Ian C.