Yes and no. I think the tradeoffs are not totally obvious.
The serializer/deserializer was written by the original authors for performance reasons. Arrays, hashtables and lists in particular require lots of recursive calls to %serialize/%deserialize. That can translate into many generic function dispatches in an inner loop. It's not clear how large the performance impact would be though; I haven't been motivated enough yet to test the change under enough different usage models to be sure it doesn't have a deleterious effect on any one.
You'd also have to push some of the shared let bindings into global variables or generic function arguments such as the serializer-hash and id counter.
I did something similar to this with the migrate function (migrate.lisp), but there the performance didn't matter. I'm not sure that code is any cleaner for being broken up than it would be if I had put it all in one function with typecase lines to clearly delineate type-specific functionality.
It would be interesting to see a performance comparison between the optimized and general approach and whether the other formulation reads better.
Ian On Dec 26, 2007, at 11:39 AM, Leslie P. Polzer wrote:
It's not really of immediate concern for me, but wouldn't it probably make sense to split the "serialize" function into a generic function and a bunch of methods? It's currently a giant typecase mudball. It would in any case be more extensible this way. Leslie -- My personal blog: http://blog.viridian-project.de/ _______________________________________________ elephant-devel site list elephant-devel@common-lisp.net http://common-lisp.net/mailman/listinfo/elephant-devel
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