[Haskell-cafe] Strings in Haskell

[Bryan Donlan]

Neil Mitchell wrote:
 > Hi Alexy,
 >
 >> Now I'm reading a
 >> Haskell book which states the same.  Is there a more efficient Haskell
 >> string-handling method?  Which functional language is the most
 >> suitable for text processing?
 >
 > There are the Data.ByteString things, which are great, and have much
 > less overhead.
 >
 > But remember that Haskell is lazy. If you are thinking "well I have to
 > process a 50Mb file", remember that Haskell will lazily read and
 > process this file, which substantially reduces the memory requirements
 > so only a small portion will ever be in memory at a time.

Or you can get the best of both worlds by using Data.ByteString.Lazy :)
Even with laziness, all the indirections that String causes hurts 
performance.