Proposal: Add NFData instances for strict and lazy ByteStrings

[Bas van Dijk]

On 26 October 2011 21:34, Bas van Dijk <v.dijk.bas at gmail.com> wrote:
> While I was hunting for a space leak in the new hackage-server (still
> haven't found it) I noticed strict and lazy ByteStrings don't have
> NFData instances. I propose to add them because it enables users to
> force ByteStrings in the principled way (using deepseq) so they don't
> need to use tricks like: B.length b `seq` ...
>
> instance NFData Strict.ByteString
>
> instance NFData Lazy.ByteString where
>    rnf Empty       = ()
>    rnf (Chunk _ b) = rnf b
>
> Note that the containers dependency of deepseq was recently dropped so
> depending on that package is not a big issue anymore.
>
> Discussion deadline: 2 weeks from now (9 November)
>
> Bas
>

Because of the upcoming ghc-7.4 release I went ahead and created a
ticket. Although the discussion period is not officially over there
was overwhelming support and not a single objection was made.

http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/5601

I just realized that bytestring is not maintained by
libraries at haskell.org but by Don and Duncan. Are you guys ok with this
change?

Cheers,

Bas