On 9 November 2011 11:02, Simon Marlow
The performance overhead of all this worries me. withCString has taken a huge performance hit, and I think there are people who wnat to know that there aren't several complex encoding/decoding passes between their Haskell code and the POSIX API. We ought to be able to program to POSIX directly, and the same goes for Win32.
We are only really talking about environment variables, filenames and command line arguments here. I'm sure there are performance implications to all this decoding/encoding, but these bits of text are almost always very short and are unlikely to be causing bottlenecks. Adding a whole new API *just* to eliminate a hypothetical performance problem seems like overkill. OTOH, I'm happy to add it if we stick with using private chars for the escapes, because then using it or not using it is a *correctness* issue (albeit in rare cases). Max