This patch creates an API whereby a btree index opclass can optionally
provide non-SQL-callable support functions for sorting. In the initial
patch, we only use this to provide a directly-callable comparator function,
which can be invoked with a bit less overhead than the traditional
SQL-callable comparator. While that should be of value in itself, the real
reason for doing this is to provide a datatype-extensible framework for
more aggressive optimizations, as in Peter Geoghegan's recent work.
Robert Haas and Tom Lane
c6e3ac11b6