Scott Lawrence
All the object serialization/deserialization libraries I could find (pretty much just binary and cereal) seem to be strict with respect to the actual data being serialized.
Binary became strict between 0.4.4 and 0.5, I think doing so improved the speed of GHC. I had a file format wrapper at the time which depended on it being lazy, and was stuck at 0.4.4 for a long time, until somebody helped me with a workaround. Performance is a bit worse than it was with 0.4.4, but I think it's better to stay with current code. The code in question is in the darcs repository at: http://malde.org/~ketil/biohaskell/biosff the relevant patch is named "Update to use [...]" -k -- If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants