Question

Is there any persistence solution for Common Lisp, such as Elephant, that allows function persistence? Currently my app stores an identifier on the db and later searches in a function table which it is, but this method does not allow dynamically created functions to be stored.

Answer 1

It’s not a database persistence mechanism, but most Common Lisps have a way of writing FASLs for all kinds of objects, including functions. For example:

cl-user(1): (compile (defun hello () (format t '~&Hello~%'))) hello nil nil cl-user(2): (excl:fasl-write (symbol-function 'hello) '/tmp/hello.fasl') t cl-user(3): (excl:fasl-read '/tmp/hello.fasl') (#<Function hello @ #x1000a964d2>) 

You can write to a stream (here I used a file for convenience), so you can trivially capture those bytes and stuff them into a database if you wished.