[Haskell-cafe] uvector and the stream interface

[Don Stewart]

sk:
> On 14.07.2008, at 18:42, Jules Bean wrote:
> >>It would be helpful to see the programs people are writing with  
> >>uvector,
> >>so I can polish up the API some more :)
> >
> >It would also be helpful to have someone explain why we have:
> >
> >Ptr a
> >ByteString
> >IOUArray
> >IOCArray
> >Data.Storable.StorableArray
> >UArr
> >
> >Of course, I know the answers to some of those questions,  
> >ByteString is obviously less polymorphic than all the others there,  
> >and Ptr a doesn't contain size information. But it seems we have a  
> >rapidly bifurcating profusion of 'typed interfaces to chunks of  
> >memory' with no obvious consistency to their naming scheme and I  
> >think it's starting to get confusing...
> 
> maybe it would be useful to look at (1) what's expected in terms of  
> the underlying array implementation and (2) in terms of array access.
> 
> (1) some things that come to mind:
> 
> * ghc heap or system heap (can the garbage collector move memory  
> during calls to C?)
> * access to a Ptr for interfacing to external libraries (possible  
> with UArr?)
> * alignment (most SIMD instruction sets require 16 byte aligned data)
> * mutability
> * strict vs (partially) lazy
> 
> (2) personally i much prefer the list-like interface provided by the  
> stream-fusion powered libraries (ndp, uvector, vector). can't the  
> stream-fusion framework and correspondingly the vector interface be  
> separated from the memory representation, provided a particular  
> concrete representation comes up with a stream/unstream pair? then it  
> would be easy to swap out the underlying representation according to  
> the required characteristics.

Yes, we have long been discussing a generic Stream library to which
the various sequence structures can be translated to and from. Already
it is useful to say, stream bytestrings into uvectors and out to lists.

If people are using uvector or stream-fusion (the list version) and
are interested in interop please let Roman, Duncan and I know, so we
can think more about how best to make it all play together.

-- Don