[web-devel] [GSoC] Text/UTF-8: Call for Benchmarks

[Jasper Van der Jeugt]

Hello all,

I'm very glad that I have been accepted again this year for the Google
Summer of Code [1] program for haskell.org. My project aims to improve
the text [2] library by converting it to internally use UTF-8 instead
of UTF-16.

UTF-8 and UTF-16 both have advantages and disadvantages, which
actually makes it a pretty complicated choice. I've written about this
a little in my [3] (especially see Tom Harper's master dissertation if
you're interested in the subject).

To support a decision here on UTF-8 vs. UTF-16, lots of benchmarks
will be needed. Hence, this is the first focus of the GSoC project:
collecting a large benchmark suite which models real-world usage of
the text library.

This is why I'd like to ask everyone who has written/knows libraries
or applications that use the text library extensively to inform me of
these efforts. The reverse dependencies list on Hackage is a good
starting point for me but it doesn't point out how popular these
packages are and how intensively they use the text library. I will
then convert a subset of this code to a
benchmark suite using criterion.

Open source code means more reliable benchmarks, because I can publish
the code I used for them. However, I'm also willing to sign
non-disclosure agreements if this means I can try out what effects the
changes have on large systems.

There's several ways to contact me: you can reply to this thread, or
you can mail me privately using `jaspervdj+text at gmail.com`. Thanks in
advance for any help!

[1]: http://code.google.com/soc/
[2]: http://hackage.haskell.org/package/text
[3]: http://jaspervdj.be/files/2011-gsoc-text-utf8-proposal.html

Cheers,
Jasper