[Haskell-cafe] ANNOUNCE: binary 0.4: high performance, pure binary parsing and serialisation

[Don Stewart]

ketil:
> Don Stewart <dons at galois.com> writes:
> 
> > The main thing is porting to ghc 6.8 -- which means the new (*faster*)
> > lazy bytestring representation, and the smp parallel quickcheck driver
> > for the testsuite (it'll use N cores, watch the jobs migrate around).
> 
> Binary 0.4 seems to require bytestring 0.9, the library formerly known
> as fps.  I just want to mention it, as most network resources (as
> found by Google) only have discoverd fps 0.7, which is not going to
> work.
> 
> (Oh, and yes, it's at darcs.haskell.org/bytestring/ )
> 
> It'd be nice - since I know you're at it anyway :-) - if hackage/cabal
> would have some support for backwards compatibility.  I know GHC 6.8
> is the thing to get, but some of us still install what comes with our
> distribution, so I hope 6.6.1 still will be supported.
> 

Normally this is farily easy to do, with cabal configurations. (See
bytestring's .cabal file for example). However, the binary internals
changed in such a way that it wasn't worth preserving backwards
buildability. Instead, you should use binary 0.3 with ghc 6.6 libs

A released version of bytestring 0.9 will be on hackage shortly.

-- Don