After some weeks of hacking, and after taking into consideration the suggestions on this list, from darcs-devel and on #haskell, I've tagged and released v0.1 of the FastPackedString library, FPS. FPS provides mmapped and malloc'd packed strings, along with a list interface to these strings. It lets you do extremely fast IO in Haskell; in some cases, even faster than typical C implementations. Some of the changes since the port from darcs include: * Added a full List interface * Full haddocks * QuickCheck and HUnit tests * Improved performance for many functions, after extensive profiling * Now uses qualified names, e.g. P.length instead of lengthPS * Type is now 'FastString', so as not to clash with the old 'PackedString' * Some new constructors, particularly for Addr# and CStrings Home: http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/fps.html Docs: http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/fps/Data.FastPackedString.html Src: ftp://ftp.cse.unsw.edu.au/pub/users/dons/fps/fps-0.1.tar.gz Darcs: darcs get --partial http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/code/fps Feedback is very welcome, and encouraged. -- Don Stewart