[Haskell-cafe] The state of binary (de)serialization

[Alexander V Vershilov]

> That sounds reasonable. If someone sends a pull request Lennart or I will review and merge it.

Doesn't binary already have it?

http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/binary/0.6.4.0/doc/html/Data-Binary.html#g:3

On 26 February 2013 05:06, Johan Tibell <johan.tibell at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 25, 2013 at 4:51 PM, Alexander Solla <alex.solla at gmail.com>
> wrote:
>>
>> On Mon, Feb 25, 2013 at 11:59 AM, Johan Tibell <johan.tibell at gmail.com>
>> wrote:
>>>
>>>
>>>> There are some blog posts and comments out there about merging cereal
>>>> and binary, is this what's the goal/going on (cfr runGetIncremental)?
>>>
>>>
>>> It's most definitely the goal and it's basically done. The only thing I
>>> don't think we'll adopt from cereal is the instances from container types.
>>
>>
>> Why not?  Those instances are useful.  Without instances defined in
>> binary/cereal, pretty much every Happstack (or, better said, every
>> ixset/acidstate/safecopy stack) user will have to have orphan instances.
>
>
> I will have to give a bit more context to answer this one. After the binary
> package was created we've realized that it should really have been two
> packages:
>
>  * One package for serialization and deserialization of basic types, that
> have a well-defined serialization format even outside the package e.g.
> little and big endian integers, IEEE floats, etc. This package would
> correspond to Data.Binary.Get, Data.Binary.Builder, and Data.Binary.Put.
>
>  * One package that defines a particular binary format useful for
> serializing arbitrary Haskell values. This package would correspond to
> Data.Binary.
>
> For the latter we need to decide what guarantees we make. For example, is
> the format stable between releases? Is the format public (such that other
> libraries can parse the output of binary)? Right now these two questions are
> left unanswered in both binary and cereal, making those packages less
> useful.
>
> Before we answer those questions we don't want to 1) add more dependencies
> to binary and 2) define serialization formats that we might break in the
> next release.
>
> So perhaps once we've settled these issues we'll include instances for
> containers.
>
>> Also, cereal has a generic instance.  Will the new binary?
>
>
> That sounds reasonable. If someone sends a pull request Lennart or I will
> review and merge it.
>
> -- Johan
>
>
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--
Alexander