The main issue seems to be that although the semantics of UIO may be
arbitrary, Wallace's patch actually broke deserialization for any
production-based UArr, and I'm not sure the benefits are worthwhile
(loading a file someone else sent you) given that endianness is
already not taken into account when loading (so the chances of someone
giving you a raw binary file that happens to contain values of the
correct endianness is rather low, it seems).
In my experience, having written several libraries in Haskell for
serialisation and deserialisation, it is highly problematic when a
library writer decides that all data to be stored began its life in
Haskell, and is only being serialised in order to be read back in
again by the same Haskell library. I have already made that mistake
myself in two different libraries now, eventually regretting it (and
fixing it).
The real utility of serialisation is when it is possible to read data
from any arbitrary external source, and to write data according to
external standards. A library that can only read and write data in
its own idiosyncratic format is not production-ready at all.
This is why I submitted the patch that enables the uvector library to
read raw binary data that was not produced by itself. I had 300Gb of
data from an external source that I needed to deal with efficiently,
and uvector was the ideal candidate apart from this small design
flaw. And yes, my code also had to deal with endianness conversion on
this data.
Regards,
Malcolm
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