Re: [Haskell-cafe] Array, Vector, Bytestring

Artyom Kazak writes:

silvio писал(а) в своём письме Mon, 03 Jun 2013 22:16:08 +0300:

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Hi everyone,

Every time I want to use an array in Haskell, I find myself having to look up in the doc how they are used, which exactly are the modules I have to import ... and I am a bit tired of staring at type signatures for 10 minutes to figure out how these arrays work every time I use them (It's even worse when you have to write the signatures). I wonder how other people perceive this issue and what possible solutions could be.

Recently I’ve started to perceive this issue as “hooray, we have lenses now, a generic interface for all the different messy stuff we have”. But yes, the inability to have One Common API for All Data Structures is bothering me as well.

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Why do we need so many different implementations of the same thing? In the ghc libraries alone we have a vector, array and bytestring package all of which do the same thing, as demonstrated for instance by the vector-bytestring package. To make matters worse, the haskell 2010 standard has includes a watered down version of array.

Indeed. What we need is `text` for strings (and stop using `bytestring`) and reworked `vector` for arrays (with added code from `StorableVector` — basically a lazy ByteString-like chunked array).

To be perfectly clear, ByteString and Text target much different use-cases and are hardly interchangeable. While ByteString is, as the name suggests, a string of bytes, Text is a string of characters in a Unicode encoding. When you are talking about unstructured binary data, you should most certainly be using ByteString. Cheers, - Ben