On 17 December 2004 16:49, John Goerzen wrote:

First, if someone were to make a working, useful package out of this, is it likely that it would become the "standard" (whatever that means) IO system in Haskell anytime in the near future? I ask because I don't want to put a lot of time into developing an IO library, and code that works with it, only to have nobody use my code because it's incompatible with everything they're doing.

I'm keen to transition over to a more general IO framework, and I believe Bens/my proposal is heading in the right direction. When we have a more complete implementation, I'd be happy to include it with GHC for experimentation, and over time transition code to use the new framework while leaving the old System.IO in place for the time being. The design isn't by any means set in stone at this stage though.

Second is my own level of expertise. I frankly don't understand how much of that code could even compile (example: I couldn't find setNonBlockingFD anywhere in my docs; maybe it's from one of those GHC.* areas), and I don't really understand the whole array/buffer situation either. I spent some time reading docs, and I'm still not sure exactly how one builds a mutable, resiable array. I've also never done anything but the most trivial FFI work.

Much of the reason for the complexity is because I was paying careful attention to performance (perhaps too much attention). I don't want the addition of a text encoding/decoding layer to the IO subsystem to affect performance more than is necessary, and that means doing the translation on raw character buffers rather than strings. Unfortunately this does mean that porting to other compilers is going to be more work. Cheers, Simon