[Haskell-cafe] Binary and Serialize classes

[Johan Tibell]

On Fri, Apr 29, 2011 at 10:25 AM, Evan Laforge <qdunkan at gmail.com> wrote:
> Indeed, and I was starting to do that... well, I would make my own
> project specific Serialize class, since the type dispatch is useful.
> But copy pasting a UTF8 encoder, or the variable length Integer
> encoder, or whatever seemed kinda unpleasant.  Surely we could expose
> that stuff in a library, whose explicit goal was that they *would*
> remain compatible ways to serialize various basic types, and then just
> reuse those functions?  E.g. that is already done for words with the
> putWordN{be,le} functions, and is available separately for UTF8.

I intend to add support for different UTF encodings to
Data.Binary.Builder for this very reason. I also intend to add two
functions to Data.Binary.Builder.Internal that lets you implement
variable length encoding as efficiently as possible.

I'm a bit skeptical of adding builders for different variable length
encodings to the library, simply because there are so many
possibilities. I think creating a binary-vle (for variable length
encoding) package would be worthwhile. I have an implementation of the
VLE used in protocol buffers.

Johan