Re: binary loadable files

[Martin Grabmueller]

> From: Keisuke Nishida <address@hidden>
> Date: Tue, 30 Jan 2001 00:20:29 -0500
> 
> I'm considering how to store bytecodes in binary files.
> I want to make it as general as possible, so that I can
> store not only bytecodes but also any Scheme objects.
> 
> I'm thinking of the following procedures:
> (Are there better names?)
> 
>   ;; Write OBJ to PORT in the binary format
>   (dump OBJ [PORT])
> 
>   ;; Read an object from PORT in the binary format
>   (pull [PORT])
> 
> If PORT is a file, pull will use read-only shared mmap
> so that some memory can be shared between processes.
> 
> Since I want to store any objects, I'm thinking of adding
> new slots `dump' and `pull' to scm_smob_descriptor.
> 
> Is that all good thing?  May I continue to work on this?

I don't know much about serialization, but there are a lot of problems
with that, at least for general serialization of all data types.  One
problem is: How can we serialize procedures, or circular data
structures?

One possibility is not to store the objects themselves, but `rules'
for constructing them.  This is what normally is done in Scheme source
code, but maybe it can be used for bytecode, too.

Just a few thoughts,
  'martin
-- 
Martin Grabmueller              address@hidden
http://www.pintus.de/mgrabmue/  address@hidden on EFnet