Ive added the rest of Adrian's functions to the api, largely without change. Still living at http://code.haskell.org/gmap/api/GMap.html The Serial code is now *finished* and tested and is living at http://code.haskell.org/gmap/serial . The user level interface is largely the same as Data.Binary, on which it is based: *Data.Serial> encode "supercalifragilisticexpialidociousness" :: [Word] [1401017574,815320646,2442711660,441247251,3504761142,212218697,3261675550,3863169456,1865717965,1399966954,6082150] I'll get to work on some benchmark now so I can see how efficiently the simple version of the api can be implemented. It doesnt really seem worth arguing over it until we have some numbers. I would hope that if merge and the associated comparison functions are declared inlinable then ghc should be able to mostly recover the original, efficient implementations. Cheers Jamie