[Haskell-cafe] How to catch exception within the Get monad (theBinary package)

[Alexey Khudyakov]

On 05.09.2010 22:02, Don Stewart wrote:
> For strict, checked binary parsing, use the cereal package. For lazy
> binary parsing with async errors, use binary.
>
Unfortunately cereal is too slow. I got ~5x slowdown with cereal and had 
to patch binary in order to incorporated error handling (essentially 
same as in cereal but simpler).

> They're the main two points in the design space. The other is to tag the
> lazy stream, and insert failure tags in the structure.
>
It won't help againist "not enough input" errors. Sometimes fragments of 
data I process are damaged they are too short, some bits are flipped 
etc. There is no way to guard againist beforementioned errors but to 
constantly check that there is enough data in stream. Also error 
handling is very useful in signalling that data is malformed. It's 
possible to use cereal but it's too slow and it's inconvenient to have 
both Binary and Serialize instances.

Also beginnig from 0.5.0.2 Get monad is strict and consume all required 
input at once. And therefore isn't suitable for lazy parsing unless 
lazyness is introduced manually.