[Haskell-cafe] Re: ANNOUNCE: text 0.8.0.0, fast Unicode text support

[Tako Schotanus]

Hi Kevin,

thanks for the pointer, although I was aware of the thread and had followed
it quite closely, it was quite interesting.
But it never explained if and why String should be avoided, all I read is
"test and decide depending on the circumstances", which in itself is good
advise, but I'd like to have an idea of the reasons so I can form in idea
before actually having to code any benchmarks :)

Knowing that String literally is a linked list of Char makes it a lot
clearer. I figured that maybe Haskell could be using some more efficient
mechanism for Strings internally, only treating it outwardly as a [Char].
But I guess that in a lot of circumstances where you're just working with
small pieces of text in non-performance critical code it's perfectly okay to
use String.

Cheers,
-Tako


On Wed, Sep 1, 2010 at 08:31, Kevin Jardine <kevinjardine at gmail.com> wrote:

> Hi Tako,
>
> The issues involved with String, ByteString, Text and a few related
> libraries were discussed at great length recently in this thread:
>
>
> http://groups.google.com/group/haskell-cafe/browse_thread/thread/52a21cf61ffb21b0/
>
> Basically, Chars are 32 bit integers and Strings are represented as a
> list of Chars.
>
> This is very convenient for small computations but often very
> inefficient for anything large scale.
>
> The String API  is also missing various encoding related features.
>
> Because of the limitations of String, various alternative libraries
> have been proposed. Text is one important option.
>
> You'll find much more detail on the above referenced thread.
>
> Kevin
>
> On Sep 1, 8:13 am, Tako Schotanus <t... at codejive.org> wrote:
> > On Wed, Sep 1, 2010 at 07:14, John Millikin <jmilli... at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > > > Don't forget, you can always improve the text library yourself. I
> love to
> > > receive
> > > > patches, requests for improvement, and bug reports.
> >
> > > Are there any areas in particular you'd like help with, for either
> > > library? I'm happy to assist any effort which will help reduce use of
> > > String.
> >
> > As a Haskell noob I'm curious about this statement, is there something
> > intrinsically wrong with String?
> > Or is it more a performance/resource problem when dealing with large
> amounts
> > of text for example?
> > (Like having to use StringBuilder in Java if you want to avoid the
> penalty
> > of repeated String allocations when simply concatenating for example)
> >
> > Cheers,
> >  -Tako
> >
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