kr.angelov:
I had the same problem (stack overflow). The solution was to change the >>= operator in the Get monad. Currently it is:
m >>= k = Get (\s -> let (a, s') = unGet m s in unGet (k a) s')
but I changed it to:
m >>= k = Get (\s -> case unGet m s of (a, s') -> unGet (k a) s')
It seems that the bind operator is lazy and this caused the stack overflow.
Hmm. That's interesting. I'm not sure that doesn't change other things we rely on though.
I have also another problem. Every Int and Word is stored as 64-bit value and this expands the output file a lot. I have a lot of integers and most of them are < 128 but not all of them. I changed the serialization so that the Int and Word are serialized in a variable number of bytes. Without this change the binary serialization was even worse than the textual serialization that we had before. The file was almost full with zeros.
The motivation for this is to use zlib compress / decompress. E.g. writeFile "f" . compress . encode $ foo
I just haven't time to prepare a patch and to send it for review but if other people have the same problem I will do it.
Patches welcome. You shouldn't need to patch a library like this, it should be able to do what you need. -- Don