Hi Haskell, I've recently created the 'smallstring' package[1] and put it on Hackage. The goal was to create a string-like type with as little memory overhead as possible, and to have equality and comparison operations be competitive with the native String type. The idea is that this type would make ideal keys into data structures like Data.Map. I've taken pains to make the library portable to other compilers, but this isn't really tested, and most of my recent development has been on GHC 7. The library is young and likely has places it could be improved, so your feedback is welcome. The API provided is small - to/fromString along with Eq and Ord instances. This isn't meant to be a replacement for the text[2] or bytestring[3] packages - the reduced size comes at a cost. Both of these libraries offer substring manipulation functions which allow the sharing of the backing memory buffers. Also, I haven't implemented any sort of string-like operations on the type as it isn't the right thing for that. I've borrowed heavily from the previously mentioned text package for the underlying array implementation, so thanks goes to Bryan O'Sullivan for maintaining the package and to all of the other authors as well. Take care, Antoine [1] http://hackage.haskell.org/package/smallstring [2] http://hackage.haskell.org/package/text [3] http://hackage.haskell.org/package/bytestring