[Yhc] ByteString

[Neil Mitchell]

Hi Creighton,

> This might be a silly question for you guys, but is there a reason why yhc
> still uses PackedString in places instead of ByteString?

Two reasons:

1) ByteStrings are totally unreliable - they can't be made to work in
GHC 6.4 and GHC 6.6 without features of Cabal that aren't even written
yet. We did move to Data.Binary, which requires ByteStrings, but had
to change back because it was a nightmare. If the benefits were
compelling we could move, but it wasn't worth it just for binary
serialisation.

2) When the code was written, there weren't ByteStrings, and no one
has had the time to port to them.

If someone ported Yhc to ByteStrings, we'd definitely accept a patch!

Thanks

Neil