[Haskell-cafe] Re: String vs ByteString

[Gábor Lehel]

On Fri, Aug 13, 2010 at 4:43 PM, Johan Tibell <johan.tibell at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Fri, Aug 13, 2010 at 4:24 PM, Kevin Jardine <kevinjardine at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> I'm interested to see this kind of open debate on performance,
>> especially about libraries that provide widely used data structures
>> such as strings.
>>
>> One of the more puzzling aspects of Haskell for newbies is the large
>> number of libraries that appear to provide similar/duplicate
>> functionality.
>>
>> The Haskell Platform deals with this to some extent, but it seems to
>> me that if there are new libraries that appear to provide performance
>> boosts over more widely used libraries, it would be best if the new
>> code gets incorporated into the existing more widely used libraries
>> rather than creating more code to maintain / choose from.
>>
>> I think that open debate about performance trade-offs could help
>> consolidate the libraries.
>>
>> Kevin
>
> I agree.
>
> Here's a rule of thumb: If you have binary data, use Data.ByteString. If you
> have text, use Data.Text. Those libraries have benchmarks and have been well
> tuned by experienced Haskelleres and should be the fastest and most memory
> compact in most cases. There are still a few cases where String beats Text
> but they are being worked on as we speak.

How about the case for text which is guaranteed to be in ascii/latin1?
ByteString again?

>
> Cheers,
> Johan
>
>
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