Hi all,
On Wed, Aug 22, 2012 at 1:40 AM, Yitzchak Gale
I see that several years ago a proposal page was prepared for adding the binary package to the Haskell Platform, but it was never actually submitted as a proposal.
http://trac.haskell.org/haskell-platform/wiki/Proposals/binary
I think the reason it was not submitted was that things were in flux at that time regarding the binary and cereal packages.
Now the situation has settled down. I think one or both of those packages ought to be added to the platform. Any opinions?
As I've mentioned before [1] I think binary and cereal should be merged. They are almost identical and both the strict (cereal) and lazy (binary) runGet interfaces can coexist in the same API, implemented on top of runGetPartial. The only remaining issue I'm aware of is that Lennart tried implementing the current binary API using continuations and it was a bit tricky to maintain performance. Furthermore, I really think the Put and Get modules should be split, which implement encoding/decoding of base types in standardized encodings, should be split from the Binary/Cereal module, which implement a very specific and non-standardized (but still useful) format. Not not break any old code I suggest that the binary/cereal package will re-export this split off API (e.g. a new binary-encodings package). 1. http://blog.johantibell.com/2011/01/merging-binary-and-cereal.html -- Johan