[Haskell-cafe] Re: String vs ByteString

[Andrew Coppin]

Donn Cave wrote:
> I wonder how many ByteString users are `working with bytes', in the
> sense you apparently mean where the bytes are not text characters.
> My impression is that in practice, there is a sizeable contingent
> out here using ByteString.Char8 and relatively few applications for
> the Word8 type.  Some of it should no doubt move to Text, but the
> ability to work with native packed data - minimal processing and
> space requirements, interoperability with foreign code, mmap, etc. -
> is attractive enough that the choice can be less than obvious.
>   

I use ByteString for various binary-processing stuff. I also use it for 
string-processing, but that's mainly because I didn't know anything else 
existed. I'm sure lots of other people are using stuff like Data.Binary 
to serialise raw binary data using ByteString too.