Quoting Hoehle, Joerg-Cyril (Joerg-Cyril.Hoehle@t-systems.com):
I'm still convinced that the benefit is too low to add that, commercial or not. It's presumably hairy to add as an afterthought. There are many many thing that would provide more value to Lispers.
(I'm not going to continue commenting on the sharable vector API in particular; I think we've both explained our preferences.)
BTW, I don't know whether it's appropriate to worry too much about efficiency in cl+ssl now. It uses Flexi-streams, of which Edi Weitz says "FLEXI-STREAMS is currently not optimized towards performance". It uses GRAY streams, which is the first thing I'd look to avoid in a quest for hopefully fast i/o. An interface built upon READ-CHAR cannot be fast. You need block operations. Simple streams and the like can get at it, not GRAY. This is a sad situation of I/O in Lisp, indeed.
That is certainly true. When I tried the sharable vector API my goal was not speed, but to use the "right" abstraction than leads to short and "reasonably" fast code. I may be biased towards what SBCL offers in that regard.
As far as CLISP is concerned, I tried CL+SSL there (with a copying implementation of with-pointer-to-vector-data) and had severe performance problems. But I don't think that those problems where related to the issues being discussed here at all.
So if you happen to know why CL+SSL is so remarkably slow on CLISP (or have ideas how to profile it), it would be nice if you could ping cl-plus-ssl-devel about it.
Thanks, David