[Haskell-cafe] Missing Network Functions

[Thomas DuBuisson]

Didn't reply to all.  Sorry for the double Johan.

Johan asked:
> will GHC be able to optimize away all
> of the Data.Binary stuff so the functions, if defined in terms of
> Data.Binary, are as efficient as a direct implementation?

Binary can be a bit slower than you might want.  I'm guessing it would
do fine for hton like operations, but in pureMD5 I noticed a 2x slow
down when using Data.Binary instead of the low-level FFI
implementation.

In C one might want:
   inline uint32_t getWord32(unsigned char *bytestring)
   {
     uint32_t *p = &bytestring;
     return p[idx];
   }

And that is extremely fast code.  In low level Haskell it looks more like:

       getNthWord n bs@(PS ptr off len) =
               inlinePerformIO $ withForeignPtr ptr $ \ptr' -> do
               let p = castPtr $ plusPtr ptr' off
               peekElemOff p n

But even this low level code seems to be excessively slow with 33% of
the MD5 run time attributed to this function.  I ment to investigate
this a couple months ago but have had zero time.

Tom