ANN: bytestring-lexing 0.5.0

[wren romano]

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-- bytestring-lexing 0.5.0
--------------------------------------------

The bytestring-lexing package offers extremely efficient bytestring
parsers for some common lexemes: namely integral and fractional
numbers. In addition, it provides efficient serializers for (some of)
the formats it parses.

As of version 0.3.0, bytestring-lexing offers the best-in-show parsers
for integral values. (According to the Warp web server's benchmark of
parsing the Content-Length field of HTTP headers.) And as of this
version (0.5.0) it offers (to my knowledge) the best-in-show parser
for fractional/floating numbers.

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-- Changes since 0.4.3 (2013-03-21)
--------------------------------------------

I've completely overhauled the parsers for fractional numbers.

The old Data.ByteString.Lex.Double and Data.ByteString.Lex.Lazy.Double
modules have been removed, as has their reliance on Alex as a build
tool. I know some users were reluctant to use bytestring-lexing
because of that dependency, and forked their own version of
bytestring-lexing-0.3.0's integral parsers. This is no longer an
issue, and those users are requested to switch over to using
bytestring-lexing.

The old modules are replaced by the new Data.ByteString.Lex.Fractional
module. This module provides two variants of the primary parsers. The
readDecimal and readExponential functions are very simple and should
suffice for most users' needs. The readDecimalLimited and
readExponentialLimited are variants which take an argument specifying
the desired precision limit (in decimal digits). With care, the
limited-precision parsers can perform far more efficiently than the
unlimited-precision parsers. Performance aside, they can also be used
to intentionally restrict the precision of your program's inputs.

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-- Benchmarks
--------------------------------------------

For the Criterion output of the benchmark discussed below, see
<http://community.haskell.org/~wren/bytestring-lexing/bench/html/readExponential-0.5.0_ereshkigal.html>.
The main competitors we compare against are the previous version of
bytestring-lexing (which already surpassed text and
attoparsec/scientific) and bytestring-read which was the previous
best-in-show.

The unlimited-precision parsers provide 3.3x to 3.9x speedup over the
readDouble function from bytestring-lexing-0.4.3.3, as well as being
polymorphic over all Fractional values. For Float/Double: these
functions have essentially the same performance as bytestring-read on
reasonable inputs (1.07x to 0.89x), but for inputs which have far more
precision than Float/Double can handle these functions are much slower
than bytestring-read (0.30x 'speedup'). However, for Rational: these
functions provide 1.26x to 1.96x speedup compared to bytestring-read.

The limited-precision parsers do even better, but require some care to
use properly. For types with infinite precision (e.g., Rational) we
can pass in an 'infinite' limit by passing the length of the input
string plus one. For Rational: doing so provides 1.5x speedup over the
unlimited-precision parsers (and 1.9x to 3x speedup over
bytestring-read), because we can avoid intermediate renormalizations.
Whether other unlimited precision types would see the same benefit
remains an open question.

For types with inherently limited precision (e.g., Float/Double), we
could either pass in an 'infinite' limit or we could pass in the
actual inherent limit. For types with inherently limited precision,
passing in an 'infinite' limit degrades performance compared to the
unlimited-precision parsers (0.51x to 0.8x 'speedup'). Whereas,
passing in the actual inherent limit gives 1.3x to 4.5x speedup over
the unlimited-precision parsers. They also provide 1.2x to 1.4x
speedup over bytestring-read; for a total of 5.1x to 14.4x speedup
over bytestring-lexing-0.4.3.3!

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-- Links
--------------------------------------------

Homepage:
     http://code.haskell.org/~wren/

Hackage:
     http://hackage.haskell.org/package/bytestring-lexing

Darcs:
     http://community.haskell.org/~wren/bytestring-lexing

Haddock (Darcs version):
     http://community.haskell.org/~wren/bytestring-lexing/dist/doc/html/bytestring-lexing

-- 
Live well,
~wren