[Haskell-cafe] Is Haskell capable of matching C in string processing performance?

[John Millikin]

Correct me if I'm wrong, but ByteStrings can't contain non-ASCII
values, right? I'm looking for something like this pseudo-C:

    typedef void (*Callback)(const uint32_t *chars, size_t n_chars, void *);
    WriterState *new_state (Callback, void *);

I tried using the Text type, but its conversions to Ptr Word16 are all
O(n) -- not much better than String.

On Thu, Jan 21, 2010 at 22:28, Don Stewart <dons at galois.com> wrote:
> jmillikin:
>> Here's the fastest Haskell version I could come up with. It discards
>> all error handling, validation, and correctness in the name of
>> performance, but still can't get anywhere near C:
>> http://hpaste.org/fastcgi/hpaste.fcgi/view?id=16423
>
> Thanks for posting the code.
>
> You're not using bytestrings??
>
> They were invented to deal with the problem of [Char] being a poor
> structure for large scale string processing, and you should have no
> problem getting C-like string performance.
>
>    http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/papers/CSL06.html
>
> -- Don
>