[Haskell] ANNOUNCE: binary 0.3 - bigger, better, faster

[Lennart Kolmodin]

Greetings friends!

I'm pleased to announce binary 0.3!

The 'binary' package provides efficient serialization of Haskell values 
to and from lazy ByteStrings. ByteStrings constructed this way may then 
be written to disk, written to the network, or further processed (e.g. 
stored in memory directly, or compressed in memory with zlib or bzlib).

In total 14 people have contributed code and many more given feedback 
and cheerleading on #haskell at freenode. Thanks to all of you!

It's available through Hackage:
   tarball: 
http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/binary/binary-0.3.tar.gz
   darcs:    darcs get http://darcs.haskell.org/binary
   homepage: http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/binary.html

It's been a while since the last release of binary [1] the 25th of 
January earlier this year. Lets have a look of what's changed since then:

API additions
-------------

The first thing you're going to notice that differs is the polished API. 
Being used by more people now than it was in January, we've added 
features that where missing before. More functions has been added to the 
Get/Put monads giving information over bytes read, remaining bytes etc 
for whenever you need to do custom serialization. You can now also read 
and write words in host endian order.

Instances has been added to handle Double, Float and Ratio.

Performance
-----------

Decoding speed has been tuned by a rewrite and is currently about half 
the speed of the lightning fast encoding.

Don't hesitate to give feedback on #haskell or by mail, we've always got 
time for a chat :)

The Binary Strike Force,
     Lennart Kolmodin
     Duncan Coutts
     Don Stewart
     Spencer Janssen
     David Himmelstrup
     Björn Bringert
     Ross Paterson
     Einar Karttunen
     John Meacham
     Ulf Norell
     Tomasz Zielonka
     Stefan Karrmann
     Bryan O'Sullivan
     Florian Weimer

  [1] http://article.gmane.org/gmane.comp.lang.haskell.general/14800

-- 
"The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education."
         -- Albert Einstein