Hi all, The Haskell version of protocol-buffer is still pre-bootstrap, but further, so there is a 0.0.5 release on http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/protocol-buffers and a darcs repository on http://darcs.haskell.org/packages/protocol-buffers/ The leading 0.0 in the type should show how early this code is :) What are protocol buffers? The are google's data interchange format: http://code.google.com/apis/protocolbuffers/docs/overview.html
What are protocol buffers?
Protocol buffers are a flexible, efficient, automated mechanism for serializing structured data – think XML, but smaller, faster, and simpler. You define how you want your data to be structured once, then you can use special generated source code to easily write and read your structured data to and from a variety of data streams and using a variety of languages. You can even update your data structure without breaking deployed programs that are compiled against the "old" format.
In addition to a manual translation of the self describing 'decriptor.proto' it has a partial code generator in Gen.hs and a stub of a parser in ProtoParser.hs and an intermediate data type in WireMessage.hs that I expect to sit between the byte stream reader/writer and the message types. Eventually the parser with read 'decriptor.proto' and the generator will emit source code to replace the manual translation. FAQ 1: Why is the Text.DescriptorProtos.* hierarchy so huge and the imports so plentiful? ANSWER 1: The namespace management. The namespace paradigm is the nested OO style namespace of C++, so I need modules and imports to fake nested Haskell namespaces. Cheers, Chris Kuklewicz