[elephant-devel] summer of code: native lisp backend?

[Robert L. Read]

On Wed, 2008-03-26 at 20:33 +0100, Leslie P. Polzer wrote:
> I suppose this is a good opportunity for me to chime in with
> a few thoughts. Aren't B+trees a choice that is too conservative
> for a modern storage backend?
> There seem to be more modern data structures (S(b) trees or
> fractal trees) that are especially well suited for storing
> variable-length keys.

Perhaps.  I would certainly hope that our design would allow such
structures to be swapped out as a "strategy" pattern.

Personally, I had never heard of those structures until you mentioned
them, and a quick search does not yield a concise description of their
advantages---or of how to implement them.

If you can briefly describe the differences that would be great.  On the
other other hand, a LISP-native back end using B+-trees would be a nice
leap forward for us; using something better might be even better but
would not lift us into a new valence band of quality.

The fact that one can find example implementations, possibly even in
LISP, of the B+-tree, is an advantage.

My personal philosophy is gradualism --- crawling is the best way to
learn to walk, and having a B+-tree implementation gets us half the way
to the latest data structure.

> 
>   Leslie
> 
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