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Finally! Fast Unicode support for Haskell

February 27th, 2009 by

On behalf of the Data.Text team, I am delighted to announce the release of preview versions of two new packages:

text 0.1
Fast, packed Unicode text support, using a modern stream fusion framework.

text-icu 0.1
Augments the text package with comprehensive character set conversion support and normalization (and soon more), via bindings to the ICU library.

These packages fill out critical pieces of functionality for the Haskell platform, without compromising on either performance or safety. Stream fusion offers the possibility of writing text manipulation code in a clean, high-level way, with intermediate allocations and traversals being fused away.

We are referring to these as preview releases because although the text package in particular has been quite heavily tested, it has not been thoroughly tuned, and we have not yet implemented a chunked lazy text representation suitable for streaming gigabytes of data. The APIs are pretty conventional, but are still subject to change.

If you want to contribute, please get copies of the source trees from here:

7 Comments »

7 Responses to “Finally! Fast Unicode support for Haskell”

  1. on 27 Feb 2009 at 08:121 Josef Svenningsson

    Excellent work! This has been a weak spot for Haskell for ages. I’m glad to see somebody stepping up on the plate and fix this.

  2. on 27 Feb 2009 at 09:192 Shae Erisson

    Awesome! That’s great! w00!

  3. on 27 Feb 2009 at 09:573 Edward Kmett

    You rock.

    Now all I need is access to ICU normalizers. *hopeful puppydog look* =)

  4. on 27 Feb 2009 at 11:574 Bryan O'Sullivan

    Josef and Shae – thanks!

    Edward, grab text-icu and load up Data.Text.ICU.Normalizer :-)

  5. on 27 Feb 2009 at 12:525 Edward Kmett

    Hah! Much obliged.

  6. on 28 Feb 2009 at 13:016 newsham

    Thank you, guys!

  7. on 22 May 2009 at 22:327 teideal glic deisbhéalach » Blog Archive » Streaming Unicode support for Haskell: text 0.2

    [...] just released version 0.2 of the Haskell text library that I announced back in February. This version fixes a number of bugs, but much more significantly, it adds a streaming mode: you [...]

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