On Wed, Nov 14, 2007 at 10:03:52PM -0800, Chad Scherrer wrote:
Hi,
I'd like to be able to use Data.Binary (or similar) for compression. Say I have an abstract type Symbol, and for each value of Symbol I have a representation in terms of some number of bits. For compression to be efficient, commonly-used Symbols should have very short representations, while less common ones can be longer. ... (1) Am I reinventing the wheel? I haven't seen anything like this, but it would be nice to be a bit more certain.
(2) This seems like it will work ok, but the feel is not as clean as the current Data.Binary interface. Is there something I'm missing that might make it easier to integrate this?
(3) Right now this is just proof of concept, but eventually I'd like to do some performance tuning, and it would be nice to have a representation that's amenable to this. Any thoughts on speeding this up while keeping the interface reasonably clean would be much appreciated.
Almost all 'real users' just use Codec.Compression.GZip. It's very fast, very compositional, and (perhaps suprisingly) almost as effective as application-specific schemes. Stefan