[Haskell-cafe] Lazy object deserialization

[Scott Lawrence]

Hey all,

All the object serialization/deserialization libraries I could find (pretty 
much just binary and cereal) seem to be strict with respect to the actual data 
being serialized. In particular, if I've serialized a large [Int] to a file, 
and I want to get the first element, it seems I have no choice but to 
deserialize the entire data structure. This is obviously an issue for large 
data sets.

There are obvious workarounds (explicitly fetch elements from the "database" 
instead of relying on unsafeInterleaveIO to deal with it all magically), but 
it seems like it should be possible to build a cereal-like library that allows 
proper lazy deserialization. Does it exist, and I've just missed it?

Thanks,

-- 
Scott Lawrence

Linux baidar 3.7.10-1-ARCH #1 SMP PREEMPT Thu Feb 28 09:50:17 CET 2013 x86_64 GNU/Linux