Currently I’m using materialized paths to efficiency return all commments but would be keen to know if AGE can help query comments for an article more powerfully.
Afaik this is pretty much the canonical way to store recursive comment trees. Or any kind of DAG.
Recursive CTEs sounds like something you would do if your total comment count in the db is not in the six figures or something. What does HN do?
Storing a pointer to each node’s parent or using sorted sets seems like it would make the parent poster’s query slower. Those approaches would make it easier to reparent comments, though, and they’d support arbitrarily deep trees (whereas the materialized path implementations I’ve seen limit path length).
Honestly I'd test both implementations to see which is fastest, but my gut is still that recursive CTEs would be fastest, while also simplest, structure-wise. You'd also still be getting all the benefits you'd expect from database-native functionality, like referential integrity and schema enforcement, etc. Presumably there's structure in these indexed string columns that the database knows nothing about, and thus can't enforce any constraints or optimize outside of plain string prefix lookups.
My experience has been that people don't try recursive CTEs because they don't realize they exist, and so they reach for all sorts of exotic or bespoke implementations of essentially that same concept. So I at least try to make sure people know they're a really solid tool to keep in your tool belt, and one that hasn't let me down yet even in very large data sets.