- Why aren't SERIALIZE and DESERIALIZE generic functions? I could just specialize them this way or augment them with auxiliary methods.
because that's much slower than an optimized typecase.
There was a similar discussion about the Elephant serializer some time ago. Someone mentioned that SBCL has dispatch speed at least on par with typecase. He might have been wrong, of course. I haven't benched it.
- Is this the intended way to support custom types in cl-serializer?
dunno, you should describe a real-world example where the standard standard-object serializer is not good for your needs, how it is not good, and what you want to achieve.
I need to change some slots of the object afterwards to make them valid in the new environment (unbind one, process another).
we never needed such a customization, therefore the above mentioned method-dispatching-serializer-mapper doesn't exist. and we even serialize continuations into the database...
Ah, on a tangent: is this functionality of your app SBCL-specific?
Leslie