[armedbear-devel] is there a good method to read/write java byte arrays?

[David Kirkman]

On Wed, Mar 17, 2010 at 9:55 AM, Alessio Stalla <alessiostalla at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Mar 17, 2010 at 5:32 PM, Alessio Stalla <alessiostalla at gmail.com> wrote:
>> On Wed, Mar 17, 2010 at 5:22 PM, Mark Evenson <evenson at panix.com> wrote:
>>> On 3/17/10 5:04 PM, Alessio Stalla wrote:
>>> […]
>>>
>>>> I wrote sys::%make-byte-array-output-stream in order to make the
>>>> runtime compiler capable of generating bytecode without using
>>>> temporary files; it wasn't meant to be used by the ABCL user, and as
>>>> such it's not very polished (for example, the type of a
>>>> byte-array-output-stream is simply STREAM). In any case, it's defined
>>>> in the ByteArrayOutputStream Java class, and as you correctly noted,
>>>> it explicitly sets the element type to (unsigned-byte 8). As a quick
>>>> and dirty solution, you could more or less copy-paste that class and
>>>> replace "output" with "input" :) (as well as update Autoload.java to
>>>> make ABCL know of the new primitives).
>>>>
>>>> We should probably polish it a bit and release it as an extension.
>>>
>>> Well, at least we should quickly  whip out the inverse version so David
>>> doesn't have to rely on hacking Stream.java (although I'm not sure when
>>> telling Stream that initAsBinaryStream() means a format of unsigned 8bit
>>> bytes will fail).
>>>
>>> I think we can commit to the interface you've implemented in
>>> ByteArrayOutputStream, as those are the basic necessary operations.
>>>
>>> Or maybe I am not seeing what potential problems there would be with
>>> this as a short-term strategy, Alessio?
>>
>> No problem at all in the implementation per se; however, when we'll
>> make it an "official" extension, the interface will change (if
>> anything, symbols won't probably be in sys anymore and they won't be
>> prefixed with %). Since this functionality will have approximately 1
>> user in the near future :), I think it's ok to commit a quick fix for
>> David. I'm working on it right now.
>
> Committed as r12557.
>
> A.
>

Thanks for implementing the inverse function so quickly!

I ended up doing a bit more hacking last night.  When I tried to serialize
structures that contain raw java objects, I realized that I need a way to
convert lisp streams into java streams so that I can use the java
serialization system.   I ended up writing:

  public static OutputStream
    outputStreamFromABCLStream(final LispObject stream) {

    if (stream instanceof org.armedbear.lisp.Stream) {
      return new OutputStream() {
        public void write(int b) {
          ((org.armedbear.lisp.Stream) stream)._writeByte(b);
        }
      };
    } else {
      throw new RuntimeException("argument not an abcl stream");
    }
  }

and another version for InputStream.  Should something like these
also go in as primitives?

-david k.