[Haskell] ANNOUNCE: FPS - FastPackedStrings 0.2

[Donald Bruce Stewart]

bulat.ziganshin:
> Hello Donald,
> 
> Wednesday, April 19, 2006, 1:23:25 PM, you wrote:
> 
> > I'm pleased to announce version 0.2 of FPS, the fast, packed string
> > library for Haskell.
> 
> i want to write some critique about current state of your lib.
> something of this may be interesting only for me
> 
> 1. it don't support Unicode. there are at least two libs (Simon's and from
> JHC) that uses UTF-8 to do this. of course, they will be not so
> efficient on some operations. i think that it is essential to
> general-purpose library and Data.PackedString replacement. Simon's lib
> already implements utf-8, latin-1, ucs-2 and ucs-4 encoding. may be
> it's possible to join them all together in one lib that uses
> prerocessing or some other technique to implement differences between
> utf-8 and fixed-width encoding

I plan to do that at some point, yes, following the structure of Simon's lib.
It should be fairly easy to merge Simon's UTF code with fps, as the
data structure is the same.

> 2. it uses ForeignPtr, that is slow in ghc 6.4 and require more
> memory than ByteArray# in any ghc version. in addition, you place two
> Ints here. it's question of taste, of course - whether we want to have
> better speed or memory requirements. i personally prefer to have
> minimal memory overhead that will be accomplished by using ByteArray#
> plus one Int to hold string's size. it's possible to write lib so it
> will use any unboxed array and this will work both with ForeignPtr
> and ByteArray# implementations. It will also allow to implement
> general list-like interface for any immutable arrays what should be
> useful, in particular for collections framework that is now written by
> JP Bernardy. of course, using general Array instead of ForeignPtr will
> make some functions (such as mmap) unimplementable for common case
 
That's quite a big change. I'd like to see a prototype first, and some
numbers. As SPJ sometimes says: "show me the code".

Cheers,
  Don