[cl-ppcre-devel] Byte vectors instead of strings

[pete-cl-ppcre at kazmier.com]

Hi Edi,

How hard would it be to modify cl-ppcre to work on byte vectors instead
of strings?  I'm trying to obtain faster performance when parsing large
log files.  Most of the time spent processing the logs is wasted on the
creation of strings.  I want to use read-sequence with unsigned-byte as
the external format to avoid that processing.  Of course, this means I
need a regexp library that can handle byte vectors.

As a newbie, is it even worth hacking cl-ppcre to use byte vectors or is
the difficulty level too high?  I am also considering learning FFI and
just making an interface to a standard C regexp library which will work
with bytes.  However, if I can use cl-ppcre, I'd prefer as its written
in CL.

Thanks,
Pete