On Sat, Dec 26, 2009 at 12:50 PM, Duncan Coutts
It's been on my TODO list for some time to design a portable low level ByteArray module that could be implemented by hugs, nhc, ghc, etc. The aim would be to be similar to ForeignPtr + Storable but using native heap allocated memory blocks.
It looks like Data.Text.Array has a bit of a head-start on this, although it sounds like you're looking for something even simpler. Currently it only apears to build on GHC and Hugs, but we could have an FFI fall-back case. I prefer the interface to Data.Primitive.ByteArray, though.
In turn this would be the right portable layer on which to build ByteString, Text and probably IO buffers too.
It looks like ByteString is aggressive about calling C code to perform a few operations - which is something we'd only be able to do for pined arrays. Antoine