Reftable iterators are created by seeking on the parent structure of a
corresponding record. For example, to create an iterator for the merged
table you would call `reftable_merged_table_seek_ref()`. Most notably,
it is not posible to create an iterator and then seek it afterwards.
While this may be a bit easier to reason about, it comes with two
significant downsides. The first downside is that the logic to find
records is split up between the parent data structure and the iterator
itself. Conceptually, it is more straight forward if all that logic was
contained in a single place, which should be the iterator.
The second and more significant downside is that it is impossible to
reuse iterators for multiple seeks. Whenever you want to look up a
record, you need to re-create the whole infrastructure again, which is
quite a waste of time. Furthermore, it is impossible to optimize seeks,
such as when seeking the same record multiple times.
To address this, we essentially split up the concerns properly such that
the parent data structure is responsible for setting up the iterator via
a new `init_iter()` callback, whereas the iterator handles seeks via a
new `seek()` callback. This will eventually allow us to call `seek()` on
the iterator multiple times, where every iterator can potentially
optimize for certain cases.
Note that at this point in time we are not yet ready to reuse the
iterators. This will be left for a future patch series.
Signed-off-by: Patrick Steinhardt <ps@pks.im>
Signed-off-by: Junio C Hamano <gitster@pobox.com>
