Josef Svenningsson writes: > What *is* true is that it is difficult to write good > performance I/O in any of the *implementations* that we > have.
GHC has everything you need to do fast I/O in Haskell. If you use hGetBufNonBlocking with 'Ptr a', you have essentially the performance of read(2). That's as fast as it can be on any given system, in any language. Even the lazy API is fast enough for pretty much everything bare the most I/O-intensive applications. The problem is not Haskell, nor is it the implementation. The problem is that beginners, including yours truly, tend to write awfully inefficient code once you give them a "String" and tell them: Here, that's the contents of your file. The lazy API hides the fact that I/O takes place, and it is very tempting to forget that you shouldn't use it like a random access list. The lazy API "encourages" you to write inefficient code. Nonetheless, the problem is the inefficient code, not the language. There has been talk about alternative I/O APIs on the list recently. It would be nice to see something happening on that front. Peter _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
