Perfect! Yes, that's exactly what I'm looking for. Amazing that I completely missed that, it's not even that new. On Thu, May 9, 2024 at 1:01 PM Henning Thielemann wrote:

On Thu, 9 May 2024, Hilco Wijbenga wrote:

...

We have Text and ByteString as alternatives to String but as soon as you want to do anything IO related (read a file, get a directory's content, et cetera) it seems your only option is to use String.

Maybe you are looking for the new versions of 'filepath' and 'directory' packages that use the OsString type from 'os-string'?

Ah, that looks very useful indeed, thank you. On Fri, May 10, 2024 at 1:37 PM Andrew Lelechenko wrote:

See also a companion package https://hackage.haskell.org/package/file-io, which connects efficient and correct OsPath with ByteString-based readFile / writeFile.

Best regards, Andrew

...

On 9 May 2024, at 21:22, Hilco Wijbenga wrote:

Perfect! Yes, that's exactly what I'm looking for. Amazing that I completely missed that, it's not even that new.

On Thu, May 9, 2024 at 1:01 PM Henning Thielemann wrote:

...

On Thu, 9 May 2024, Hilco Wijbenga wrote:

...

We have Text and ByteString as alternatives to String but as soon as you want to do anything IO related (read a file, get a directory's content, et cetera) it seems your only option is to use String.

Maybe you are looking for the new versions of 'filepath' and 'directory' packages that use the OsString type from 'os-string'?

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Yes, thank you. I was aware of that but AFAICT, it still uses FilePath (i.e. String) and _that_ is what I want to avoid. On Thu, May 9, 2024 at 6:33 PM Brent Yorgey wrote:

There is also e.g. the Data.Text.IO module from the text package, for doing file I/O and other such things with Text instead of String.

-Brent

On Thu, May 9, 2024 at 2:29 PM Hilco Wijbenga wrote:

...

Hi all,

We have Text and ByteString as alternatives to String but as soon as you want to do anything IO related (read a file, get a directory's content, et cetera) it seems your only option is to use String.

For an occasional IO action, this is obviously irrelevant but for a compiler, a build system, or anything else that does a lot of IO this seems like it would be(come) an issue. So I was wondering what would be involved in adding (portable) support for System.IO with an alternative to String (this alternative does not necessarily need to be Text or ByteString).

I did a little bit of research into how GHC handles this and there appear to be several other String types in the GHC tree, including ByteString(?). How feasible is an alternative System.IO API? How tied to GHC would such an alternative need to be? To be clear, I am not looking to _replace_ System.IO but to _add_ an alternative API (and not a wrapper that maps to/from String).

Please do not assume I necessarily know what I am talking about! Especially, when it comes to the "portable" part. :-)

Cheers, Hilco _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list To (un)subscribe, modify options or view archives go to: http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe Only members subscribed via the mailman list are allowed to post.

FWIW in the modern setting it’s much better to use https://hackage.haskell.org/package/text-2.1.1/docs/Data-Text-IO-Utf8.html Best regards, Andrew

On 10 May 2024, at 09:44, Dan Dart wrote:

Do you instead want https://hackage.haskell.org/package/text-2.1.1/docs/Data-Text-IO.html ? _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list To (un)subscribe, modify options or view archives go to: http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe Only members subscribed via the mailman list are allowed to post.