Re: [Haskell-cafe] two problems with Data.Binary and Data.ByteString

On Tue, 2008-08-26 at 15:31 -0700, Bryan O'Sullivan wrote:

On Tue, Aug 26, 2008 at 3:04 PM, Don Stewart wrote:

...

No, since I can get whnf with `seq`. However, that does sound like a good idea (a patch to the parallel library? )

I suspect that patching parallel doesn't scale. It doesn't have a maintainer, so it will be slow, and the package will end up dragging in everything under the sun if we centralise instances in there. I think that the instance belongs in bytestring instead. I know that this would make everything depend on parallel, but that doesn't seem as bad a problem.

This is a general problem we have with packages and instances. Perhaps in this specific case it wouldn't cause many problems to make bytestring depend on parallel (though it means bytestring cannot be a boot lib and cannot be used to implement basic IO) but in general it can be a problem. I can't see any obvious solutions. We don't want lots of tiny packages that just depend on two other packages and define a instance. Duncan