[Haskell] mini-announce: fast packed strings v0.1

[Donald Bruce Stewart]

After some weeks of hacking, and after taking into consideration the
suggestions on this list, from darcs-devel and on #haskell, I've tagged
and released v0.1 of the FastPackedString library, FPS.

FPS provides mmapped and malloc'd packed strings, along with a list
interface to these strings. It lets you do extremely fast IO in Haskell;
in some cases, even faster than typical C implementations.

Some of the changes since the port from darcs include:
    * Added a full List interface
    * Full haddocks
    * QuickCheck and HUnit tests
    * Improved performance for many functions, after extensive profiling
    * Now uses qualified names, e.g. P.length instead of lengthPS
    * Type is now 'FastString', so as not to clash with the old 'PackedString'
    * Some new constructors, particularly for Addr# and CStrings

Home:   http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/fps.html
Docs:   http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/fps/Data.FastPackedString.html
Src:    ftp://ftp.cse.unsw.edu.au/pub/users/dons/fps/fps-0.1.tar.gz
Darcs:  darcs get --partial http://www.cse.unsw.edu.au/~dons/code/fps

Feedback is very welcome, and encouraged.

-- Don Stewart