Re: fast local-file storage for Gnus

[Dave Love <d.love@dl.ac.uk>]

Ted Zlatanov <tzz@lifelogs.com> writes:

> Right, but I don't know how to write that primitive in C, and in Lisp
> it would probably be too slow.

One doesn't go writing things as primitives without measuring the Lisp
version (if writing it in Lisp is possible), at least without a lot of
experience.

> If we're going to write that
> primitive, why not make it a generic interface with
> get/set/delete/commit functions with a plain text backend?  

If you don't need to do any more than dump and restore a table, you
don't need to introduce a new Lisp type, for instance.

> I really don't know what to measure, since there's only the
> alist-to-plain-file mechanism right now :)

I don't understand why you think you need to build an alist:

(let ((table (make-hash-table)))	; should be given realistic size
  (with-temp-buffer
    (insert-file-contents "fred")
    (condition-case ()
	(let ((standard-input (current-buffer)))
	  (while t
	    (puthash (read) (read) table))) ; assumes LR arg evaluation
      (error nil)))
  table)

-- 
We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the
time: premature optimization is the root of all evil.  -- Donald Knuth