Binary: high performance, pure binary encoding, decoding and serialisation for Haskell ---------------------------------------------------------------------- The Binary Strike Team is pleased to announce release 0.4 of Data.Binary, the pure, efficient binary serialisation library for Haskell, now available from Hackage: tarball: http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/binary/0.4 darcs: darcs get http://darcs.haskell.org/binary The 'binary' package provides efficient serialisation of Haskell values to and from lazy ByteStrings, and a low level layer for high performance decoding and decoding binary data. ByteStrings constructed this way may then be written to disk, written to the network, or further processed (e.g. stored in memory directly, or compressed in memory with zlib or bzlib). *Very* high performance can be expected, with throughput over 1G/sec observed in practice (good enough for most networking scenarios, we suspect). Encoding and decoding are achieved by the functions: encode :: Binary a => a -> ByteString decode :: Binary a => ByteString -> a which mirror the read/show functions. Convenience functions for serialising to disk are also provided: encodeFile :: Binary a => FilePath -> a -> IO () decodeFile :: Binary a => FilePath -> IO a To serialise your Haskell data, all you need do is write an instance of Binary for your type. For example, suppose in an interpreter we had the data type: import Data.Binary import Control.Monad data Exp = IntE Int | OpE String Exp Exp We can serialise this to bytestring form with the following instance: instance Binary Exp where put (IntE i) = putWord8 0 >> put i put (OpE s e1 e2) = putWord8 1 >> put s >> put e1 >> put e2 get = do tag <- getWord8 case tag of 0 -> liftM IntE get 1 -> liftM3 OpE get get get The binary library has been heavily tuned for performance, particularly for writing speed. On average, Data.Binary is 10x faster than NewBinary, and has the advantage of a pure interface, and bytestring return values. Binary was developed by a team of 8 during the Haskell Hackathon, Hac 07, in January 2007, and this maintainence release has taken place during the second hackathon. Binary is portable, using the foreign function interface and cpp, and has been tested with Hugs and GHC. Happy hacking! -- Don