This is cool, thanks Zach!

Another set of mostly-isomporphic types that this could be applied to is 
different matrix/array types in core.matrix. core.matrix already has 
generic conversion mechanisms but they probably aren't as efficient as they 
could be. I'll take a look and see if the same techniques might be 
applicable.

Quick question for you and the crowd: does there exist or should we build a 
standard immutable byte data representation for Clojure? 

I think this is often needed: ByteBuffers and byte[] arrays work well 
enough but are mutable. Byte sequences are nice and idiomatic but have a 
lot of overhead, so people are often forced to resort to a variety of other 
techniques. And it would be nice to support some higher level operations on 
such types, e.g. production of efficient (non-copying) immutable 
subsequences.

>From a data structure perspective, I'm imagining something like a 
persistent data structure with byte[] data arrays at the lowest level.

Given the amount of data-processing stuff people are doing, it seems like a 
reasonable thing to have in contrib at least? 


On Saturday, 29 June 2013 18:57:58 UTC+1, Zach Tellman wrote:
>
> I've recently been trying to pull out useful pieces from some of my more 
> monolithic libraries.  The most recent result is 'byte-streams' [1], a 
> library that figures how how to convert between different byte 
> representations (including character streams), and how to efficiently 
> transfer bytes between various byte sources and sinks.  The net result is 
> that you can do something like:
>
>   (byte-streams/convert (File. "/tmp/foo") String {:encoding "utf-8"})
>
> and get a string representation of the file's contents.  Of course, this 
> is already possible using 'slurp', but you could also convert it to a 
> CharSequence, or lazy sequence of ByteBuffers, or pretty much anything else 
> you can imagine.  This is accomplished by traversing a graph of available 
> conversions (don't worry, it's memoized), so simply defining a new 
> conversion from some custom type to (say) a ByteBuffer will transitively 
> allow you to convert it to any other type.
>
> As an aside, this sort of conversion mechanism isn't limited to just byte 
> representations, but I'm not sure if there's another large collection of 
> mostly-isomorphic types out there that would benefit from this.  If anyone 
> has ideas on where else this could be applied, I'd be interested to hear 
> them.
>
> Zach
>
> [1] https://github.com/ztellman/byte-streams
>

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