Binary IO

[David Brown]

On Fri, 22 Apr 2005 13:56:20 -0700, Glynn Clements  
<glynn at gclements.plus.com> wrote:

> Personally, I doubt that Haskell will ever be practical for processing
> very large amounts of data (e.g. larger than your system's RAM).

Well, I haven't had any problems implementing the kind of processing I've  
been doing.  I wrote a utility to scan through a directory structure and  
compute SHA1 hashes of all of the files.  When implemented smartly, it  
spends about 97% of its time in the SHA1 hash computation (A C library),  
so does't really have much different of an overhead of one written in a  
less pleasant language.

Written with lazy lists, and a Haskell SHA1 is is hundreds of times slower.

I don't think Haskell will be a barrier to writing something like backup  
software, as long as it is possible to hand the data around in chunks.

Dave