[Haskell-cafe] Binary serialization, was Re: Abstraction leak

[Paul Moore]

On 05/07/07, Dave Bayer <bayer at cpw.math.columbia.edu> wrote:
> How's this, only one line is specific to your problem:
[...]
> >     md5 <- doShell "md5 -q md5.hs"

Doesn't work on my (Windows) PC, where I have no md5 command
available. While I agree in theory with the idea of combining focused
tools, it's a potential portability nightmare, particularly on Windows
where decent command line tools are almost non-existent on a clean
install.

You're changing the problem from finding a Haskell library (which only
needs to be installed on the development machine at compile time) to
finding a 3rd party utility, which has to be installed at runtime on
any machine using the compiled Haskell program. Not a good trade-off.

And I'm not going to get into Windows/Linux arguments... :-)

Paul.