[Haskell-cafe] ANN: A triple of new packages for talking to the outside world

[Bryan O'Sullivan]

Adam Langley wrote:

> Ok, see http://www.imperialviolet.org/IncrementalGet.hs

That's excellent!  This is just the sort of thing one wants if getting
dribs and drabs of information instead of a steady stream.  For example,
I need to reconstruct TCP streams from individual packets captured off
the wire, and this is a much easier mechanism to use than playing tricks
with the direct-mode Get monad.

> Questions:
>   1) Should Finished include the remainder of the ByteString (e.g.
> that which wasn't used by that parser)

Yes, definitely.  I had to add a runGetState to the existing Get monad
so that I could recover the unparsed residual, so I'm sure it will be
necessary here.

>   2) I've no idea what I've done to the parse speed

Getting the API right is the appropriate thing to be doing first.
Afterwards, the rewrite rule ninjas can stage a night attack on
performance problems.

> But if this is useful to you, make any requests. I'll (hopefully) do
> them, clean it up and push a new release of binary-strict.

I'm lobbying for Don and company to include this stuff in the regular
binary distribution.  A proliferation of almost-identical packages
doesn't serve the community all that well.

Thanks for the nice work!  I'll try to put that code to use in perhaps a
few days, and let you know how the API works out in practice.

	<b