Re: Proposal: splitting the network package

On 17 January 2013 23:51, Gregory Collins wrote:

On Thu, Jan 17, 2013 at 1:37 PM, Graham Klyne wrote:

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I don't want to be defensive, but I'd like to know what criteria would be satisfied by "a decent URI library that we can bless".

Network.URI is well-written, has a (mostly) acceptable API, and has tests, but facts on the ground have changed since you wrote this module in 2004. These days, the use of String in text-processing code is pretty close to disqualifying IMO. My criteria for a "decent URI library that we can bless" would be:

* datatypes and primitive functions using ByteString and/or Text, with parsing and rendering functions working both on Text and on utf-8-encoded ByteStrings

* a faster parser. I just plugged Network.URI's parser into criterion and got a timing of 12µs to parse a 52-character URI. Switching the benchmark to use a 365-character URI causes the time to balloon to 85µs. That's looking pretty linear at roughly 4MB/s throughput. As a data point, on the same machine my work-in-progress Snap branch based on io-streams can parse a 365-byte HTTP request in 1.8µs (about 190 MB/s), and that's running through a bunch of streaming IO gunk.

...

As an implementation of RFC 3986 [1] (the current definitive specification of a URI), I believe Network.URI is fairly complete. I'm sure there are aspects that might be considered poor style, poorly implemented, lacking some useful functions, or poor API design, but nobody's really said what they are (*). And I'd suggest that all but the final one of those criteria are fixable in an existing library.

Fixable yes, fixed by anyone yet? no. Michael's uri-conduit has the "correct" types, but that library is under-documented, incomplete compared to Network.URI, and there's no way the canonical URI library should be depending on conduit.

c'mon, it's not like anyone needs to go parsing billions of URIs in a hurry. But seriously, Graham's URI module was one of the things that convinced me about Haskell in the first place: that the libraries are so well-written that they are the reference implementation of a standard. Browsing the docs for Network.URI and the time library really convinced me that people in Haskell land care about doing things correctly. Sure, someone should write a faster version with more fashionable types, but I'd really view that as an incremental improvement. Conrad.