Can Clojure support a byte-array literal?

Question

Byte arrays are fundamental to many domains: cryptography, audio and video processing, file handling, socket ops, etc. Clojure's host platforms support byte arrays and Clojure itself even offers an immutable byte array (clojure.core.Vec).

Unfortunately, there is no support for a byte array literal and various attempts to add support have not been successful for surprising reasons.

Am I missing something, or is this simply not possible? And if it's not possible, could such support be added?

Answer 1

Unless I'm missing something, three years ago you have asked the same exact thing: https://ask.clojure.org/index.php/9567/possible-create-tagged-literal-reader-for-clojure-core-vec

Why create a new post? It'll only end up spreading the already thin attention this issue has. That's why posts here have votes.

Am I missing something, or is this simply not possible? And if it's not possible, could such support be added?

Given that that other question has only one vote in 3 years, I'd say not that many people care for the maintainers to put it high enough in the priority list.

Comments

You are right, Eugene.  I had forgotten about posting this here, and when Alex asked me last night to post here (see #clojure slack channel) I did it too quickly thinking my only posts were in CLojureVerse.

Mods: please delete this question.