[Haskell-cafe] API for reading a big binary file

[Ranjan Bagchi]

Hi --

I'm still learning to use ghc effectively, and I'm trying to use it  
for more-or-less mundane programming tasks, hopefully in a way which  
is a lot more elegant than I'd do in Java or Perl.

I've got a big [around a gigabyte] binary file, filled with identical  
binary structures (imagine a C process writing structs).  I'd like to  
process/analyze them efficiently.  In C or even Java, i'd memory map  
the file and extract the data I need.

Is there a fast way to do this using ghc?  I can extract fields by  
using a ByteString, but I may not be using it fast enough:  I've had  
to write my own routines to extract ints, longs and doubles.

The other option is to write the loading code largely in C, but I'm  
not clear how to write a data type which maps well to a C struct.

Any help / examples would really be appreciated.

Thanks,

Ranjan