plperl vs. bytea

I have been talking with Theo some more about his recent problem with 
bytea arguments and results (see recent discussion on -bugs and also 
recent docs patch),  what he needs is a way to have bytea  (and possibly 
other unknown types) passed as binary data to and from plperl. The 
conversion overhead is too big both computationally and  in increased 
memory usage. After discussing some possibilities, we decided that maybe 
the best approach would be to allow a custom GUC variable that would 
specify a list of types to be passed in binary form with no conversion, e.g.
 plperl.pass_as_binary = 'bytea, other-type'

This would affect function args, trigger data, return results, and I 
think it should also apply to arguments for SPI prepared queries and to 
SPI returned results.

If this seems like a good idea maybe it should go on the TODO list in 
whatever is the current incarnation.


cheers

andrew