[elephant-devel] Lisp Btrees: design considerations

[Ian Eslick]

> However, in theory someone could write a compressing serializer right
> now, independently of implementing a pure-lisp Btree-based backend.

Definitely true, and quite welcome.

> For example, the serializer that Rucksack has written could be  
> inserted
> in place of our existing serializer (or even set a configurable  
> option)
> if we found it to be a better codec.

Actually I wouldn't do that quite yet.  If we're going to be putting  
things into the C world via BDB, then we should keep the serializer  
that is efficient at doing that!

However, I suspect that postmodern, CL-SQL and the lisp backend would  
all benefit from a lisp serializer that serialized lisp objects into  
lisp byte arrays.  Today we serialize a lisp object into a buffer- 
stream, then copy the buffer stream back into a lisp array, then write  
it out via postmodern or CL-SQL's interface which, for CL-SQL, then  
copies it into a base 64 text string...

Ian