David Brown wrote:
And hGet/PutWord8 are fast enough for most situations.
Are you certain? Which interesting applications do you know that read and write one byte at a time? I can't speak for "most" situations, but in those situations where I needed binary I/O this API would have been impracticable.
I'm going to chime in agreement with the disagreement.
I have one application which uses single character binary I/O. Because it works on small files, it borders on usefuleness. As time goes on, the size of these inputs grows, and now the tool has become nearly worthless.
I seem to run into this kind of thing a lot with Haskell. Dominic's ASN library is useful to me, however I'm finding I'll probably just have to use it as a template for new code. It works fine for what designed for, parsing keys and such, but I'm looking to use it to represent gigabytes of data. Processing data like that one Word8 at a time isn't practical.
Personally, I doubt that Haskell will ever be practical for processing
very large amounts of data (e.g. larger than your system's RAM).
When processing large amounts of data, rule #1 is to do as little as
possible to most of the data; don't even read it into memory if you
can avoid it (e.g. create an index and use lseek() as much as
possible). You certainly don't want to be boxing/unboxing gigabytes.
--
Glynn Clements