buffer-builder-0.2.4.4: Library for efficiently building up buffers, one piece at a time
Data.BufferBuilder is an efficient library for incrementally building
up ByteString
s, one chunk at a time. Early benchmarks show it
is over twice as fast as ByteString Builder, primarily because
BufferBuilder
is built upon an ST-style restricted monad and
mutable state instead of ByteString Builder's monoidal AST.
Internally, BufferBuilder is backed by a few C functions. Examination of GHC's output shows nearly optimal code generation with no intermediate thunks -- and thus, continuation passing and its associated indirect jumps and stack traffic only occur when BufferBuilder is asked to append a non-strict ByteString.
I benchmarked four approaches with a URL encoding benchmark:
- State monad, concatenating ByteStrings: 6.98 us
- State monad, ByteString Builder: 2.48 us
- Crazy explicit RealWorld baton passing with unboxed state: 28.94 us (GHC generated really awful code for this, but see the revision history for the technique)
- C + FFI + ReaderT: 1.11 us
Using BufferBuilder is very simple:
import qualified Data.BufferBuilder as BB let byteString = BB.runBufferBuilder $ do BB.appendBS "http" BB.appendChar8 '/' BB.appendBS "//"
This package also provides Data.BufferBuilder.Utf8 for generating UTF-8 buffers and Data.BufferBuilder.Json for encoding data structures into JSON.