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

[Don Stewart]

bos:
> 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.

Yeah, I'm happy to attack that problem. The key is finding a useful API
that you actually can work with for real problems. This looks like a
good step -- and interesting to see how you're needs differed from 
the original intent.

> > 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.

I'm happy to -- if people need a slightly different API, we should do
what we can to support that. 

The goal is to make binary hacking in Haskell painless, so anything that
helps that goal, is good :)

-- Don