[slime-devel] New wire format

[Matthew Mondor]

On Sun, 06 Nov 2011 18:13:07 +0100
Helmut Eller <heller at common-lisp.net> wrote:

> The new format looks so:
> 
>   | byte0 | 3 bytes length |
>   |    ... payload ...     |
> 
> The 3 bytes length header specify the length of the payload in bytes.
> The playload is an s-exp encoded as UTF8 text.  byte0 is currently
> always 0; other values are reserved for future use.  Robert Brown said
> he'd like to use compression, so byte0 might come in handy.

I think that's a nice idea

> The change breaks backward compatibility.  When upgrading, make sure
> that both Lisp and Emacs use the new format.

Did the previous protocol also have such a 0x00 byte prefix?  If so, it
would be possible to use 0x01 this time and provide more backwards
compatibility...

If not, I could perhaps suggest that the byte in the future be used to
hold a protocol version as well as flags (such as as you mentioned,
for gzip-compressed, etc).
-- 
Matt