[elephant-devel] Lisp Btrees: design considerations

[Robert L. Read]

On Wed, 2008-05-14 at 23:27 -0400, Ian Eslick wrote:
> 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!
> 

Well, if we're willing to have type-specific serializers, I don't know
why we couldn't use back-end specific serializers as well, and leave
what we have in place for BDB.

>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...

Right.  And the only good reason to retain the Cl-SQL backend, given the
superiority of the postmodern one, and the fact that postmodern doesn't
base64 encode things, is to support SQlite3.  But of course, if we had a
pure-lisp backend, one of the incentives to support SQLite3 would go
away.