On 7/5/12 4:57 AM, Ben Gamari wrote:
Recently, I spent a fair amount of time tracking down an encoding issue[1] in the `serialport` package. As is often the case, `serialport` used Strings, which blew up quite nicely when working with a binary protocol. Delving into the code it eventually became fairly obvious that the problem was due to encoding and could be fixed by completely moving to ByteStrings.
Unfortunately, while the unix package contains a System.Posix.IO.ByteString module, all of the functions within still appear to work with Strings[2]. While it appears that paths are handled a bit differently in the ByteString variant, but it seems like this is a fairly small consideration compared to the data itself.
It is indeed a small consideration, IMO. In order to use ByteStrings as the medium of the data being exchanged, you want to use the unix-bytestring library[1]. Unfortunately that may be taxing on newer GHCs since the new version of unix stole the namespaces from unix-bytestring. I had tried to get unix-bytestring incorporated into unix previously (before unix's .ByteString modules existed), but made the unfortunate decision to emulate the String-based API--- and noone liked the old API to begin with, so the proposal was rejected. I've since modified the API to what I think is a nice design. It closely mirrors the official POSIX and XPG standards, and has been battle-tested by myself and other folks who were eschewing the unix package and doing their own ByteString-based operations. I'd love for unix-bytestring to be folded into unix itself, but have no time to make another proposal. If you'd like to do so on my behalf, feel free. [1] http://hackage.haskell.org/package/unix-bytestring -- Live well, ~wren