Re: Some dynamic module questions

[Philipp Stephani]

Am Fr., 27. Nov. 2020 um 16:26 Uhr schrieb Eli Zaretskii <eliz@gnu.org>:
>
> > Date: Fri, 27 Nov 2020 16:21:14 +0100
> > From: Vasilij Schneidermann <mail@vasilij.de>
> > Cc: eller.helmut@gmail.com, p.stephani2@gmail.com, emacs-devel@gnu.org
> >
> > > I don't yet see why would you need to send data to a module.  Why not
> > > generate that data in the module code itself, based on some Lisp you
> > > get from Emacs?
> >
> > I don't see why you would need to question my approach:
>
> Because adding an interface doesn't come for free.  Someone will need
> to code it, test, document it, etc.  That is why the modules interface
> allows only a relatively small set of objects across.

That is correct, but in this case the costs are outweighed by the
benefits. Byte arrays are a ubiquitous fundamental data type (similar
to integers or timestamps), and Emacs modules need good support for
them. For better or worse, Emacs has been using unibyte strings to
represent binary data for a long time (cf. bindat, image), so also
supporting them in modules for this purpose doesn't really introduce
new uses.
Unibyte support has now been requested at least three times
independently (https://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=23487,
https://debbugs.gnu.org/cgi/bugreport.cgi?bug=34873, this thread),
showing how much users care about it.