Efficient Taxonomy Intersection

To generalize this is issue of retrieving all terms of taxonomy A that posts with specific term of taxonomy B have.

While this is not impossible in several steps and plenty of looping through posts (which will indeed be inefficient), I think it’s reasonable to go through SQL for efficiency.

My rough take on it would be:

/**
 * Get all terms of $tax_to taxonomy that posts in $term_from of $tax_from have.
 *
 * @param string $tax_from  taxonomy name
 * @param string $term_from term slug
 * @param string $tax_to    taxonomy name
 *
 * @return array|WP_Error
 */
function get_intersected_terms( $tax_from, $term_from, $tax_to ) {

    global $wpdb;

    $term_from = get_term_by( 'slug', $term_from, $tax_from );

    $query = "
    SELECT term_id FROM {$wpdb->term_taxonomy} WHERE taxonomy = '{$tax_to}' AND term_taxonomy_id IN (
        SELECT term_taxonomy_id FROM {$wpdb->term_relationships} WHERE object_id IN (
            SELECT object_id FROM {$wpdb->term_relationships} WHERE term_taxonomy_id = {$term_from->term_taxonomy_id}
        )
    )
    ";

    $term_ids = $wpdb->get_col( $query );

    if( empty( $term_ids) )
        return array();

    return get_terms( $tax_to, array( 'include' => $term_ids ) );
}

// example
var_dump( get_intersected_terms( 'category', 'cat-a', 'post_tag' ) );