[Haskell-cafe] Re: [Haskell] string type class

[Duncan Coutts]

On Fri, 2009-03-06 at 19:16 +0000, Chris Kuklewicz wrote:
> Matthew Pocock wrote:
> > It seems every time I look at hackage there is yet another stringy 
> > datatype. For lots of apps, the particular stringy datatype you use 
> > matters for performance but not algorithmic reasons. Perhaps this is a 
> > good time for someone to propose a stringy class?
> 
> Not likely.
> 
> I did define my own (private) class for regular expressions, to abstract over 
> String, the ByteStrings, and Seq Char.  But it is used in one place and is a 
> wart that should be removed.
> 
> The simple task of looping over the contents of a String (once, forward) is 
> quite different from a Strict ByteString (using an index and a lookup).
> 
> This means for decent efficiency I need two copies of my code, hand specialized 
> to each case.
> 
> "tail" or "(x:xs)" : very efficient for String (no allocation)
> "tail" or "uncons" : not efficient for ByteString (allocation, might as well 
> convert to [Char]

head/tail/uncons on a strict or lazy ByteString is perfectly ok. I would
recommend it over using length+index. If you are using tail in a tail
recursion then ghc can almost always optimise it to unbox the various
ByteString components and so there is no allocation of fresh BS
constructors, just adjusting offsets and lengths held in registers.

It's also possible to use unsafeHead and unsafeTail if you've checked
for null.

Duncan