[rucksack-devel] Using rucksack for simple object serialization.

[Arthur Lemmens]

Luís Oliveira wrote:

> I am looking into the possibility of using rucksack at first for
> simple object serialization. I have two questions. a) Is rucksack
> stable enough for such use?

Yes, I think so.  Serialization is one of the easy parts of Rucksack,
and I don't expect many problems there.

Then again, if you only care about serialization you could consider
using CL-STORE instead of Rucksack.

> Since the serialization stuff in serialize.lisp does not handle
> object circularity by itself, does rucksack provide some other API
> to serialize objects to a stream?

Hmm... I created Rucksack's serialization library by simplifying a
standalone serialization library that *did* handle object circularity.
I could consider putting those parts back.

Alternatively, you could accept a bit more of Rucksack's normal paradigm:
use classes with metaclass PERSISTENT-CLASS for those objects that may be
referenced more than once, and wrap a WITH-RUCKSACK and WITH-TRANSACTION
around the parts of your program where persistent objects are created or
modified.  If you don't care about stuff like transactions or garbage
collection of persistent objects, it would be pretty easy to turn those
off.

Arthur