[Haskell-cafe] List x ByteString x Lazy Bytestring

[John Sneer]

Hello Café,

  I've used Haskell and GHC to solve particular real life application. 4
  tools were developed and their function is almost the same - they
  modify textual input according to patterns found in the text. Thus, it
  is something like a compiler, the result is also a text and it is not
  parsed to tokens as patterns appear on a different level.

  The tools differ in tasks and number of modifications performed,
  otherwise, in principal, they are very much similar.

  I used lists (Prelude, Data.List) to develop the tools. After
  successfully completing the development, I've started to optimize the
  code to make the tools faster. After modification of some algorithms
  (which dropped the processing time notably), I started to change data
  structures. I swapped lists with lazy bytestrings. Nevertheless, what
  an unpleasant surprise, the processing speed dropped down,
  significantly / more then 30% time needed). 

  So my questions follow:
- What kind of application is lazy bytestring suitable for?
- Would it be worth using strict bytestring even if input files may be
large? (They would fit in memory, but may consume whole)
- If bytestring is not suitable for text manipulation, is there
something faster than lists?
- It would be nice to have native sort for lazy bytestring - would it be
slower than  pack $ Data.List.sort $ unpack ?
- If bytestring is suitable for text manipulation could we have some
hGetTextualContents which translates Windows EOL (CR+LF) to LF?

I'm sorry if the answers are obvious.
Could anyone point me to some article/pages I could read about?

  Thanks and regards,

    John

-- 
http://www.fastmail.fm - A fast, anti-spam email service.