Re: creating unibyte strings

[Eli Zaretskii]

> From: Elias Mårtenson <address@hidden>
> Date: Mon, 25 Mar 2019 09:47:26 +0800
> Cc: Stefan Monnier <address@hidden>, emacs-devel <address@hidden>
> 
>  Can you tell why the byte buffer needs to be exposed to Lisp in this
>  case?  IOW, what would a Lisp program using this module want to do
>  with these byte buffers?
> 
> In this particular case, I'm exposing GSSAPI, which is a rather low level 
> interface to Kerberos (well, it supports
> multiple systems, but it's mostly used for Kerberos).
> 
> For example, one function is called gss-unwrap, and it takes an encrypted 
> byte array and decrypts it, returning
> a new byte array with the decrypted content. 
> 
> What the impact is depends on the Elisp code that uses GSS. In the case of 
> IMAP for example, it's not too
> bad, since only the initial handshake is passed through these functions (IMAP 
> encryption is handled by TLS,
> not Kerberos). However, there are other uses where every single package is 
> passed through the wrap and
> unwrap functions. 

I guess I was asking why is this done in Lisp, not in C.  The
decrypted stuff is human-readable text, is it not?  Then why would a
Lisp program want to see the encrypted byte array?