[Cryptography] Use Linux for its security

Ron Garret ron at flownet.com
Sat Oct 1 10:43:20 EDT 2016


On Sep 30, 2016, at 1:24 PM, Henry Baker <hbaker1 at pipeline.com> wrote:

> This also *guarantees* that Lisp can never compete
> with some other languages in the efficiency of high volume I/O.

It guarantees no such thing.  This is not a problem with Lisp, at worst it’s a problem with the Lisp *reader*.  Lisp != Read.

But it’s not even a problem with the reader, it’s a problem with Lisp's default array serialization syntax.  *No* language can read that syntax — or any open-ended variable-length serialization format, including JSON — efficiently because the information needed to do so simply isn’t there.

The Right Answer is to define a new syntax that includes information about the size of the array.  Fortunately, Common Lisp allows the reader to be extended so that doing this is an elementary exercise.

But if you really care about reading arrays efficiently you probably want to use a binary representation with a header that tells you the size and use read-sequence.  That can be as fast as C.

(Surely you knew all this?  Why are you of all people spreading FUD about Lisp???)

rg



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