Proposal: add ByteString support to unix:System.Posix.IO API

[wren ng thornton]

On 2/28/11 12:28 PM, Johan Tibell wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 28, 2011 at 9:20 AM, Bryan O'Sullivan<bos at serpentine.com> 
wrote:
>> On Sun, Feb 27, 2011 at 9:18 PM, wren ng thornton<wren at freegeek.org> 
wrote:
>>>
>>> I've written variants of the System.Posix.IO API for strict and lazy
>>> ByteStrings which are currently lingering in their own unpublished
>>> package[1]. It's silly to have a separate package for just four
functions,
>>> so I'd like to see it combined into the unix package. I don't have
access to
>>> create a new ticket with the patch, but it's available at [2].
>>
>> I think that the strict bytestring version should just replace the current
>> function in System.Posix.IO, and the lazy version should not go in at all.
>> This is the approach taken by the network package, and it's cleanest.
>
> Thanks for working on this Wren.
>
> I agree with Bryan's point.

So then what would become of the string variants? Backwards compatibility
and all... not _everyone_ uses ByteStrings yet.

Also, FWIW, the real impetus behind writing these was to deal with lazy
ByteStrings, since that's what one of my dependencies uses[1]. It seems
like a common enough situation that it should be handled directly. Forcing
people to call (BS.concat . BL.toChunks) first muddies up the code and
introduces additional copying, whereas making people use (mapM_ fdWrite .
BL.toChunks) is still rather messy and it's buggy in the face of partial
writes.

For network usage I agree that the strict-only approach is clean and
effective. For general purpose writing to Fds, I'm not so sure.


[1]
http://hackage.haskell.org/packages/archive/protocol-buffers/1.8.0/doc/html/Text-ProtocolBuffers-WireMessage.html#v:messageWithLengthPut

-- 
Live well,
~wren