[cl-ppcre-devel] Byte vectors instead of strings

Hi Edi,

How hard would it be to modify cl-ppcre to work on byte vectors instead of strings? I'm trying to obtain faster performance when parsing large log files. Most of the time spent processing the logs is wasted on the creation of strings. I want to use read-sequence with unsigned-byte as the external format to avoid that processing. Of course, this means I need a regexp library that can handle byte vectors.

As a newbie, is it even worth hacking cl-ppcre to use byte vectors or is the difficulty level too high? I am also considering learning FFI and just making an interface to a standard C regexp library which will work with bytes. However, if I can use cl-ppcre, I'd prefer as its written in CL.

Thanks, Pete