Donn Cave wrote:
I wonder how many ByteString users are `working with bytes', in the sense you apparently mean where the bytes are not text characters. My impression is that in practice, there is a sizeable contingent out here using ByteString.Char8 and relatively few applications for the Word8 type. Some of it should no doubt move to Text, but the ability to work with native packed data - minimal processing and space requirements, interoperability with foreign code, mmap, etc. - is attractive enough that the choice can be less than obvious.
I use ByteString for various binary-processing stuff. I also use it for string-processing, but that's mainly because I didn't know anything else existed. I'm sure lots of other people are using stuff like Data.Binary to serialise raw binary data using ByteString too.