Announce: cl-mysql

After some deliberation I decided to try out what I was talking about in The Not So Super Super API. The idea of being able to hook a low-level API, so that it’s functionality could be tweaked later seemed quite appealing to me. In reality, whilst what I had intended was indeed achievable the performance sucked so hard as to make me rethink what I had done.

I did though, in the process, create an alternate library to using CLSQL which has support for stored procedures that return result sets, better (IMHO) type inference and is far simpler to deploy. So it wasn’t totally in vain. I intend to extend the library a little to work on the performance and provide a more faithful Common Lisp implementation in the near-future.

Full details of the cl-mysql library are available on this page.

Thanks to the power of Lisp’s macros I am able to make the low-level API hooking dependent upon a compile-time special variable. That way I can generate the additional code for the API hooking, if I want to, or leave it out whilst I’m working on other aspects of the library. Don’t you just love Lisp?! Hopefully we’ll revisit this topic some time later too.

Finally, I realise now that announcing anything on April Fool’s day is possibly a mistake. It seems that the signal-to-noise ratio in the world has gone down quite significantly in the last-few-hours :-). I guess that makes me the fool then.