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