Hello, Bulat I'm currently working on some kind of program for analysing FAT partitions. Don't ask why did I chose to implement it in Haskell :) Just for fun. My program needs to read scattered chunks of binary data from a huge file and to do a good amount of deserialisation. I implemented basic functionality using Handles and Ptr's and now I'm starting to regret for it. I have some pieces of code like: type PtrAdvancer a b = StateT (Ptr a) IO b peek_one :: Storable b => PtrAdvancer a b peek_one = do p <- get res <- lift $ peek $ castPtr p put $ plusPtr p $ sizeOf res return res peek_many :: Storable b => Int -> PtrAdvancer a [b] peek_many 0 = return [] peek_many n = do first <- peek_one rest <- peek_many $ n-1 return $ first:rest data DirEntry = DirEntry { name :: String, attr :: Word8, crt_time_tenth :: Word8, crt_time :: Word16, crt_data :: Word16, lst_acc_data :: Word16, wrt_time :: Word16, wrt_date :: Word16, fst_cluster :: Word32, file_size :: Word32 } deriving Show instance Storable DirEntry where sizeOf _ = 32 alignment _ = 32 peek = evalStateT peek_dir_entry peek_dir_entry = do n <- peek_many 11 :: PtrAdvancer a [Word8] at <- peek_one peek_one :: PtrAdvancer a Word8 ctt <- peek_one ct <- peek_one cd <- peek_one lad <- peek_one fch <- peek_one :: PtrAdvancer a Word16 wt <- peek_one wd <- peek_one fcl <- peek_one :: PtrAdvancer a Word16 fs <- peek_one return $ DirEntry (words_to_str n) at ctt ct cd lad wt wd ((fromIntegral fch `shiftL` 16) + fromIntegral fcl) fs or: read_cluster_chain32 :: Handle -> FatAddress -> Cluster -> IO [Cluster] read_cluster_chain32 h start cluster = do allocaBytes 4 $ \p -> chain32' p cluster True where chain32' p c need_seek = do when need_seek $ hSeek h AbsoluteSeek (fromIntegral $ start + c * 4) hGetBuf h p 4 val <- peek p :: IO Word32 let val28 = val .&. 0x0fffffff case val28 of 0x0 -> return [] 0x0fffffff -> return [c] otherwise -> do rest <- if c+1 == val28 then chain32' p val28 False else chain32' p val28 True return $ c:rest It works with a mediocre speed (about 10Mb/s when extracting files), but design is ugly IMO. For example I need to write twice as much number of lines of marshalling code compared to C. For data type declaration and then for Storable instance. Is there a way to avoid it?

with my lib, you can either read data directly from file (through implicit 512-byte buffer) or read whole file into the automatically allocated buffer with `readFromFile`. what is better - depends on what you plan to do with rest of file

Now I'm going to rewrite my code to make use of io library. So my question is whether your library is well suited for such application (frequent positioning and reading small pieces of data).