Re: [Haskell-cafe] Re: String vs ByteString

Quoth "Bryan O'Sullivan" ,

On Sat, Aug 14, 2010 at 10:07 PM, Donn Cave wrote: ...

...

ByteString will continue to be the obvious choice for big data loads.

Don't confuse "I have big data" with "I need bytes". If you are working with bytes, use bytestring. If you are working with text, outside of a few narrow domains you should use text.

I wonder how many ByteString users are `working with bytes', in the sense you apparently mean where the bytes are not text characters. My impression is that in practice, there is a sizeable contingent out here using ByteString.Char8 and relatively few applications for the Word8 type. Some of it should no doubt move to Text, but the ability to work with native packed data - minimal processing and space requirements, interoperability with foreign code, mmap, etc. - is attractive enough that the choice can be less than obvious. Donn Cave, donn@avvanta.com