[Haskell-cafe] Bytestrings and [Char]

[Nick Bowler]

On 18:11 Tue 23 Mar     , Iustin Pop wrote:
> I agree with the principle of correctness, but let's be honest - it's
> (many) orders of magnitude between ByteString and String and Text, not
> just a few percentage points…
> 
> I've been struggling with this problem too and it's not nice. Every time
> one uses the system readFile & friends (anything that doesn't read via
> ByteStrings), it hell slow.
> 
> Test: read a file and compute its size in chars. Input text file is
> ~40MB in size, has one non-ASCII char. The test might seem stupid but it
> is a simple one. ghc 6.12.1.
> 
> Data.ByteString.Lazy (bytestring readFile + length) - < 10 miliseconds,
> incorrect length (as expected).
> 
> Data.ByteString.Lazy.UTF8 (system readFile + fromString + length) - 11
> seconds, correct length.
> 
> Data.Text.Lazy (system readFile + pack + length) - 26s, correct length.
> 
> String (system readfile + length) - ~1 second, correct length.

Is this a mistake?  Your own report shows String & readFile being an
order of magnitude faster than everything else, contrary to your earlier
claim.

-- 
Nick Bowler, Elliptic Technologies (http://www.elliptictech.com/)