README

Babel is a charset encoding/decoding library, not unlike GNU libiconv, but
completely written in Common Lisp.

It strives to achieve decent performance.  To that effect, we use OpenMCL's
approach of calculating the destination buffer size in advance.  Most of the
encoding/decoding algorithms have been adapted from OpenMCL's source.

Another important goal is reusability.  Similarly to SBCL, we define an
interface wherein the algorithms can be reused between a variety of data
types so long we're dealing with conversions between octets and unicode
code points.

Babel comes with converters between strings and (unsigned-byte 8) vectors
but can be easily extended to deal with, e.g., strings and foreign memory,
vectors and Closure's runes, etc...