[Haskell-cafe] Using Data.Binary for compression

[Stefan O'Rear]

On Wed, Nov 14, 2007 at 10:03:52PM -0800, Chad Scherrer wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I'd like to be able to use Data.Binary (or similar) for compression.
> Say I have an abstract type Symbol, and for each value of Symbol I
> have a representation in terms of some number of bits. For compression
> to be efficient, commonly-used Symbols should have very short
> representations, while less common ones can be longer.
...
> (1) Am I reinventing the wheel? I haven't seen anything like this, but
> it would be nice to be a bit more certain.
> 
> (2) This seems like it will work ok, but the feel is not as clean as
> the current Data.Binary interface. Is there something I'm missing that
> might make it easier to integrate this?
> 
> (3) Right now this is just proof of concept, but eventually I'd like
> to do some performance tuning, and it would be nice to have a
> representation that's amenable to this. Any thoughts on speeding this
> up while keeping the interface reasonably clean would be much
> appreciated.

Almost all 'real users' just use Codec.Compression.GZip.  It's very
fast, very compositional, and (perhaps suprisingly) almost as effective
as application-specific schemes.

Stefan
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