Binary IO

[Simon Marlow]

On 22 April 2005 21:56, Glynn Clements wrote:

> David Brown wrote:
> 
>>>> And hGet/PutWord8 are fast enough for most situations.
>>> 
>>> Are you certain? Which interesting applications do you know
>>> that read and write one byte at a time? I can't speak for
>>> "most" situations, but in those situations where I needed
>>> binary I/O this API would have been impracticable.
>> 
>> I'm going to chime in agreement with the disagreement.
>> 
>> I have one application which uses single character binary I/O. 
>> Because it works on small files, it borders on usefuleness.  As time
>> goes on, the size of these inputs grows, and now the tool has become
>> nearly worthless. 
>> 
>> I seem to run into this kind of thing a lot with Haskell.  Dominic's
>> ASN library is useful to me, however I'm finding I'll probably just
>> have to use it as a template for new code.  It works fine for what
>> designed for, parsing keys and such, but I'm looking to use it to
>> represent gigabytes of data.  Processing data like that one Word8 at
>> a time isn't practical. 
> 
> Personally, I doubt that Haskell will ever be practical for processing
> very large amounts of data (e.g. larger than your system's RAM).

I hope that's not true - whatever techniques you use in other languages
for handling large amounts of data should translate straightforwardly
into Haskell.

Cheers,
	SImon