Hi all,

I recently finished up writing streaming facilities via libarchive bindings and lazy bytestrings. It ended up working nicely - reading from a file lazily and then unpacking the archive was more efficient in time + allocations than reading the file all at once.

That got me thinking - what exactly is wrong with lazy I/O? I've seen Oleg Kiselyov's paper (http://okmij.org/ftp/Haskell/#lazyIO-not-True) and I've run into issues myself (basically the issue here: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/31342012/read-and-writing-to-file-in-haskell), but none of those seem so pathological - the second issue could be better resolved with linear types!

Are the any explanations of why Haskell *does* use lazy I/O? Laziness allows symmetries between values and generators of values - surely it is not *that* immoral to enforce this even in the IO monad?

Cheers,
Vanessa McHale