[Haskell-cafe] Re: Abstraction leak

[Philip Armstrong]

On Wed, Jul 04, 2007 at 09:02:15PM +1000, Donald Bruce Stewart wrote:
>phil:
>> On Sun, Jul 01, 2007 at 06:07:13PM +0100, Andrew Coppin wrote:
>> >I haven't actually tried, but presumably a TCP connection is represented 
>> >in the same way as a file, and so has the same problems.
>> >
>> >Basically doing binary I/O seems to be one of those things that in Haskell 
>> >falls into the class of "it's possibly but annoyingly messy"...
>> 
>> In an ideal world there would be a 'deriving Serializable[1]' you
>
>derive Binary
>    (use an external tool for this)

such as?

>> could do on datatypes which would get this right. In a really ideal
>> world, you could specify the data layout somehow[2][2a], which would
>
>Directly in Haskell data type decls -- see the ICFP 05 paper on the
>House OS, which added packing annotations, and bit syntax. In current
>Haskell, you specify the layout in instances Storable or Binary.

I'll have a look.

>> make integrating Haskell code into a wider distributed network of
>> processes exchanging binary data a cinch. In a super really ideal
>
>Definitely. See things like the zlib or iconv
>Data.Binary/Data.ByteString bindings, for prototypes. The 'tar'
>reader/writer on hackage.haskell.org is also a good example.

OK. Maybe this is the sort of stuff which ought to go into the new
Haskell book? 'Integrating Haskell with external data sources' or
something...

>> world, you could operate on the packets in place in Haskell where
>> possible and save the deserialization overhead...
>
>Data.ByteString.* for this.
>
>> Anyone trying to do any of this?
>
>Yeah, its a bit of a hot topic currently. :)

>Gotta chase Erlang for hacking network data.

Absolutely. Ta for the pointers anyway.

Phil

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