[Haskell-cafe] Re: [Haskell] ANNOUNCE: binary: high performance, pure binary serialisation

[Tomasz Zielonka]

On Fri, Jan 26, 2007 at 02:16:22PM +1100, Donald Bruce Stewart wrote:
> We believe so, and its a bug if this is not the case.
> 
> The src documents the encoding format used for each type (we were unable
> to attach haddocks to instances.. grr.)
> 
> All data is encoded in Network order, and extended to 64 bits for word
> sized values (like Int). It should be possible to encode a structure
> with ghc on x86, and decode it on a sparc64 running hugs.

Did you consider using an encoding which uses variable number of bytes?
If yes, I would be interested to know your reason for not choosing such
an encoding. Efficiency?

Best regards
Tomasz