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Date: Thu, 18 Mar 2010 12:55:21 -0400
Message-ID: <99828cd71003180955k48ae834flb8ad2c55b5001692@mail.gmail.com>
To: Derick Rethans <derick@php.net>
Cc: internals@lists.php.net
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Subject: Re: [PHP-DEV] PHP Variable Storage / DBUS
From: ben.demott@gmail.com (Ben DeMott)

Thanks for the response Derick,
So is the data structure thats being serialized remaining in some form
thats reflective of its binary encoding on the system.
Or is there some byte-encoding that goes on to generalize the binary structure?

I guess ... Does it find the values in memory of the distinct values,
and then create a serialized set of indexes in a c-compatible
data-type?
or... is this just another form of string serialization, where
variables are represented by strings encoded in ASCII?

If this is a binary serialization two additional questions:
1.) Does this mean that you can to some accuracy determine the size of
an in-memory variable by counting the sizeof() on the components that
make up the data-structure in C?
2.) Can the PHP sessions serialization be made to use this type of
serialization - so the serialized values could be shared between
multiple applications.. (let me give you an example)
     Would I be better off just re-implementing the PHP C code for its
session serializer/deserializer in Python than attempting to keep it
binary?

For PHP Sessions, lets say you use memcached to store a serialized
representation of the session.
Lets also say that you would like to read that session data
occasionally by python to offload work that your webserver would
normally have to perform.

If you were to write a binary serialized form to memory - the C
implementation of the serialization could by very easily ported to
Python as an extension and both could be maintained with ease
(as both PHP and Python are written in C, a Java variant wouldn't be
too hard either using JNI)

I guess this brings up the question of - How hard would it be to
expose the binary object that dbus sends over-the-wire so it could be
written to file instead?

Overall it would be nice if PHP had a functionality similar to Pythons
Pickle -> to expose to the user so they could store binary
representations of objects as they saw fit.
It seems to me this would be vastly more efficient than an
ascii-encoding and serialization as well.

If my logic is poorly formed because of a lack of understanding please
feel free to educate me!

Thanks Again Derick - Cheers!