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

[Donald Bruce Stewart]

tomasz.zielonka:
> On Fri, Jan 26, 2007 at 04:31:28PM +0100, Henning Thielemann wrote:
> > On Fri, 26 Jan 2007, Donald Bruce Stewart wrote:
> > 
> > > 
> > >         Binary: high performance, pure binary serialisation for Haskell
> > >      ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 
> > > 
> > > The Binary Strike Team is pleased to announce the release of a new,
> > > pure, efficient binary serialisation library for Haskell, now available
> > > from Hackage:
> > >     
> > >  tarball:    http://hackage.haskell.org/cgi-bin/hackage-scripts/package/binary/0.2
> > >  darcs:      darcs get http://darcs.haskell.org/binary
> > >  haddocks:   http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/binary/Data-Binary.html
> > 
> > I want to write out data in the machine's endianess, because that data 
> > will be post-processed by sox, which reads data in the machine's 
> > endianess. Is this also planned for the package?
> 
> I also have to use a specific serialisation format. I guess we could
> both simply use putWord8, but then we'll probably lose most of the
> benefits of using the library.
> 
> Perhaps we could think about introducing some "encoding contexts", with
> a default encoding that can be automatically derived, but also with the
> ability to create one's own encodings?

Note that using Binary directly for non-Haskell structures is a bit like
using Read/Show instances for parsing non-Haskell structures: possible,
but not optimal. 

It would be better to use the underlying Get/Put monads available in
binary, with the low level support for explicit endian and word sized
writes/reads, to build a combinator library on top for these more
flexible parsing/binary requirements (like layering Parsec over ReadP or
HughesPJ).

-- Don