On Thu, Jan 14, 2010 at 1:20 PM, Alberto G. Corona
2010/1/14 Michael Snoyman
Well, for one thing, you'd need to use lazy IO to achieve your goal, which has some safety issues. As things get more and more complex, the requirements of lazy IO will continue to grow. This also has implications for number of open file handles and deterministic space usage. Given the fact that a lazy bytestring and easily be converted to an enumerator, I think it makes sense to start a new package using this approach.
These must be issues of base library developers, not application
developpers. TIme ago a guy said me that using an standard library like malloc for memory allocation where not the optimum. And he was right. Fortunately things went in the "non-optimum" direction. You can make the application faster by using your own plumbing code instead of standard libraries provided that you have enough time and knowledge. Because I don´t have neither of the two :-) (nor have the people that read my code and maintain the application), I really like the laziness of haskell and the lazy bytestring interface.
Lazy bytestring interface is one thing; lazy IO is another. If you have
pure code generating a lazy bytestring, Hack will work fine for you. Try this one however: take a 10MB YAML file, reformat it using something in the IO monad (for example, look up values from a database) and produce HTML output. Hack will *not* allow you to run in constant space without significant usageof unsafe functions. Michael