Can you please expand on this? I've been using Data.Binary to (de)serialize messages for some networking protocols, and have made all my types instances of Binary. Non-Haskell programs will be receiving and sending messages on one end, but I didn't think that mattered since my get and put functions are written to adhere to the protocol's definition. Is there some issue I'm missing?

On Mon, May 10, 2010 at 6:18 AM, Stephen Tetley <stephen.tetley@gmail.com> wrote:

Hi Tom

If you are interfacing with non-Haskell binary objects - you will want
binary parsing / writing rather than simple serialization as the
format will be determined by the foreign objects.

You can still use Data.Binary (indeed its probably the best choice),
but you will want to use the modules Data.Binary.Get and
Data.Binary.Put directly and probably avoid the Binary class as it is
specialized to serializing values for Haskell only.

There are probably quite a few libraries on Hackage that you can look
at for examples, though there might be more packages that supply
parsers only and don't do writing, e.g:

http://hackage.haskell.org/package/pecoff (Parser only)

There will be more among the packages this list that directly depend on Binary:
http://bifunctor.homelinux.net/~roel/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/revdeps/binary-0.5.0.2#direct

Best wishes

Stephen
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