Re: [Haskell-cafe] ANNOUNCE: vector-bytestring-0.0.0.0

Am 17.10.2011 12:14, schrieb Bas van Dijk:

On 17 October 2011 10:18, Christian Maeder wrote:

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I think the cleanest solution (just from a theoretical point of view) is to use a newtype for your byte strings.

- it should have the same performance - allows to make ByteString really abstract when hiding the newtype constructor

But what would a newtype ByteString = ByteString (Vector Word8) abstract over? What's there to hide? Vectors are already abstract so users can't mess with their internals.

Maybe some of the functions that start with "unsafe"? Or why do you use the safe variant (VS.head) in your own implementation? http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/vector/0.9/doc/html/Data-Vector-...

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- is portable and supplies control over all other instances (not just Show)

What other instances (besides Show) should have different semantics than those of Vector?

instance Read (and maybe the vector package will evolve further).

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I'm not sure if one could make really bad thinks to your ByteString by using the Vector interface, but one would want to disallow vector operations just for compatible with other byte strings.

My idea is that when vector-bytestring is as fast as bytestring, it can replace it. When that happens it doesn't matter if users use the vector interface. I would even recommend it over using the bytestring interface so that bytestring can eventually be deprecated in favor of vector.

So your package basically supports an unfortunate mix of bytestring and vector functions? How about proposing a better bytestring interface (if it should not just be that of vector)? Btw. a really abstract bytestring could easily be implemented on top of your package. Cheers Christian

Bas