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

[Don Stewart]

duncan.coutts:
> In message <20071009150558.GC31961 at scytale.galois.com> Don Stewart
> <dons at galois.com> writes:
> > 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
> 
> I'm not convinced that it's not possible. I made my zlib, bzlib and iconv libs
> work with ghc-6.4, 6.6, and 6.8 which all reply on the internals of Data.ByteString.
> 
> So just as soon as I get my ADSL working I'll have a look at making binary work
> with ghc-6.6 too (and getting the newer faster code integrated as well).
> 
> So much to do...

The issue is explicit access to the LPS constructors, which afaik
requires cpp to be backward compatible. Maybe that's ok, maybe its not
important.

-- Don