[Haskell-cafe] serialized data structures (Was: Generalized, named, and exportable default declarations)

[Henning Thielemann]

We have seen a lot of effort of better integrating Text into Haskell 
programming. The only purpose of doing so is to replace String by 
something more space and time efficient. What would happen if we invest 
equally much time into making String as efficient as Text? At ICFP 2019 I 
attended a talk about Gibbon:

    https://github.com/iu-parfunc/gibbon

The idea of the project is to serialize (Haskell's) tree data structures 
in memory as much as possible. Wouldn't this enable us to use String 
instead of Text, again, maybe even lists instead of Vectors? No more Text 
integration efforts, no more external library with GHC-specific manual 
optimizations. Unfortunately, the project is still in an early stage. So 
far, it only supports strict data structures.

What if we would not complicate the language and generalize syntactic 
sugar for Text, but instead improve data layout for all Haskell types and 
eventually make a custom Text type unnecessary?