[fpc-pascal] Any recommendations for a good in-memory storage type

[Michael Van Canneyt]

On Wed, 22 Sep 2010, Marco van de Voort wrote:

> In our previous episode, Graeme Geldenhuys said:
>>> I would first try a variant.
>>
>> Just for getting the initial DND support to work under Xlib, I limited
>> myself to text types only, so choose variant as my storage type, but
>> now that I'm moving to the next phase (multiple data types), I am
>> considering other storage types because I don't know if variant is
>> suitable for binary data like sound, images etc..
>
> No. But it allows you to keep text as text, not as streamed value. I don't
> know if assigning a string to a variant is copy-on-write though.
>
> If you don't operate much on it, it doesn't matter. But the above sounds
> like you do most of the work on text, not binary blobs.
>
>> I'm leaning towards
>> TMemoryStream now. Just spotting the new incoming messages, Felipe and
>> Michael seem to share my thoughts on that.
>
> They didn't ask what you wanted to do exactly either :-)
>
> variants support most base Delphi types, afaik including class , interface
> and dyn array.

For the kind of data he is most likely to receive, a stream still seems best.

For most data formats, maybe a TStringSTream is better suited. You'll have
the text as data available at once, which is the most likely use anyway, and
has all semantics of a stream.

Michael.