John Meacham writes:
hPutBufNonBlocking :: Handle -> Ptr a -> Int -> IO Int hGetBufNonBlocking :: Handle -> Ptr a -> Int -> IO Int
What is difficult to implement about these functions? Aren't they just wrappers for read(2) and write(2)?
In any case, these seem much too low level for the task at hand, which is to just make portable binary IO _possible_. not necessarily efficient or elegant.
Well, there is a difference between "it is possible" and "it does actually work", and my guess is that any non-trivial application which performs byte-wise I/O will _not_ work in practice. I doubt you could implement Darcs with that API; and you certainly couldn't implement Bittorrent with this API (which was the question that spawned this thread).
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.
We certainly don't want to have to teach a new user about Foreign.C.Storable just because they want to do a little simple binary IO.
That's why you write libraries which provide a more comfortable API based on the primitives. You cannot write such a library, however, if your primitives are slow to begin with! Don't get me wrong -- I don't oppose the addition of those functions to the standard libraries. I just don't think they'll be good for much in the real world. Peter