Hac 07: Deferred binary

As part of Hac 07 I have written a Deferred binary library. It's not released yet, since I'll need to change some bits, but I have managed to write a pickle/unpickle combinator which is pretty minimal. It can save to a file and load from a file in binary.

The first step is to take your data structure:

> data Computer = Laptop {weight :: Int, wireless :: Bool} | Desktop {software :: [String]}

Then you need to write your combinators:

instance BinaryDefer Computer where
bothDefer = serial
[\ ~(Laptop a b) -> unit Laptop <<> unit Desktop << a =""> Handle -> a -> IO ()
getDefer :: BinaryDefer a => Handle -> IO a

This gives you all the power to save and load your data structure. No need to manually assign tags, no need to write get/put versions, just one set of combinators. Needless to say, this was pretty tricky to set up!

But this is all stuff that belongs in a binary library, so what is a deferred binary library? Well perhaps there are a lot of software packages on a desktop, and usually the program doesn't care about them. Maybe 90% of the file will be the software packages, so 90% of the time will be wasted in reading the file. Of course, sometimes the software is queried, so it still has to be available. Using deferred binary, you can change the combinator to say which fields are loaded in a deferred manner:

\ ~(Desktop a) -> unit Desktop <<~ a

That extra ~ is the single change. Now the file format adapts to store the software list in a different place and it is read only when needed. Much more efficient, yet still the same simple underlying interface.

This is the binary library that Hoogle 4 will be using!