fast IO in ghc

[Wolfram Kahl]

 > 
 > I tend to deal a lot with very very large data files in Haskell and my
 > current approach to dealing with getting data out of one program an into
 > another is writing it to a file using 'show' and then reading it in using
 > 'read'.  Unfortunately, this is very slow and produces very large files
 > which are very slow to read and write.

Be careful with your choice of Read and Show instances.

Standard reading of lists is ``strict in the closing bracket'',
so the first element is only returned after the end of the list
has been read.

I tend to define my own instances, using a fairly standard set
of parser combinators working on the ReadS type ---
this speeds up things considerably (and runs in less memory).

This can, of course, also be used to get file size down,
but in my circumstances this was not a major problem
(rarely had files of more than a few tens of megabytes),
and human-readability was useful to have.


Wolfram