[Haskell-cafe] two problems with Data.Binary and Data.ByteString

[Tim Newsham]

> Ah, that would be a bug in older ByteString implementations, that were a
> bit incautious about closing handles. This example works for me with
>
>    bytestring-0.9.1.0

Yup, thank you Don and Duncan for pointing this out.  I updated
my bytestring library and the test case no longer fails.  However,
I'm still having problems and not sure why.  I was able to
distill the problem down to this:

   $ od -x 1word32.bin
   0000000      0500    2ca4

   $ runhaskell test6.hs
   loading...
   saving...
   test6.hs: 1word32.bin: openFile: resource busy (file is locked)

   $ cat test6.hs
   module Main where
   import Control.Applicative
   import Control.Parallel.Strategies (rnf, NFData, using)
   import Data.Binary
   import qualified Data.ByteString.Lazy.Char8 as B
   import Data.Word

   stateFile = "1word32.bin"

   loadState :: IO Word32
   loadState = decode <$> B.readFile stateFile

   saveState :: Word32 -> IO ()
   saveState db = B.writeFile stateFile $ encode db

   {-
   -- Works!
   loadState = B.readFile stateFile
   saveState = B.writeFile stateFile
   -}

   -- force x = print x >> return x
   force = return . (`using` rnf)

   main = do
       putStrLn "loading..."
       d <- force =<< loadState
       putStrLn "saving..."
       saveState d


I tried this both with "print" and "rnf" to the same effect.
It looks like there still might be some situations where the
file isn't being closed?

Should the file be closed when the last byte is read (in this
case its definitely reading all four bytes) or when the first
byte after that is read (in this case it probably doesn't
attempt to read more than 4 bytes)?

Tim Newsham
http://www.thenewsh.com/~newsham/