Hello all After reading the modules docs and some other discussions, I'm still not sure what's the best choice of tools for my problem. I'm looking at the scion server code base. At the moment, it's reading and writing on sockets using Lazy ByteStrings, then converting them to Haskell Strings using utf8-string. The Haskell Strings are then parsed as JSON using the JSon package. the response is in JSON, translated back with utf8-string to ByteStrings. This is efficient for small strings, but as I'm extending the API I have calls with much more data, and performance degrades significantly. Timings seem to point to the encoding of the String to UTF8. I have replaced JSon by AttoJson (there was also JSONb, which seems quite similar), which allows me to work solely with ByteStrings, bypassing the calls to utf8-string completely. Performance has improved noticeably. I'm worried that I've lost full UTF8 compatibility, though, haven't I? No double byte characters will work in that setup? Is Data.Text an alternative? Can I use that everywhere, including for dealing with sockets (the API only mentions Handle). Should I use Data.ByteString.UTF8 everywhere, rewriting the JSON parser to deal with this instead of the Word8 ByteStrings? In short, what's the fastest way to implement receiving/sending UTF8 text across sockets? Thanks for any pointer, -- JP Moresmau http://jpmoresmau.blogspot.com/