This is what I spent the past 3 months on. Pickling code that interoperates with a C++ server that sends things to me little- endian. And sends other wierd data like unicode strings that are zero- terminated. SerTH does not handle things like that since it cannot divine the wire format for you. I used the pickler combinators approach which worked great in theory since I could specify the wire format and have a single spec for pickling and unpickling. In practice this turned out to be too slow and I still don't know why. I'm still waiting to see how this should really be done. Joel On Dec 27, 2005, at 7:35 AM, Jeremy Shaw wrote:
There is one important difference in my mind. Most of the pickling code is concerned with turning haskell data into a binary stream that can later be turned back into haskell data. There is no interoperability required -- the thing that writes it is the thing that will read it.
For parsing arbitrary binary data formats a few other important issues arise that you can sometimes forget about with pickling such as:
~ byte-alignment ~ big-endian vs little endian ~ size of data types (for example is Char one byte or four) ~ bitwise parsing
Both pickling and binary format parsing can be built on the same underlying low-level binary access methods.