Packed Data Support in Haskell

Packed Data support in Haskell This blog post aims to be a short and accessible summary of a paper that will be published at ECOOP 2025, titled Type-safe and portable support for packed data. Introduction: Packed Data When programs want to persist data or send it over the network, they need to serialise it (e.g. to JSON or XML). On the other hand, when a program receives data from the network or reads it from a file, data needs to be deserialised. flowchart LR Server(["Server"]) Server --> SD["Serialise"] SD -- Network --- RD["Deserialise"] RD --> Client(["Client"]) These de/serialisation steps are necessary because we cannot use the in-memory representation/layout of the data in a file or when sending it over the network, mainly because of the pointers it may contain. Consequently, de/serialising data has a cost: it takes time, and the serialised version of the data is usually bigger than its in-memory representation. In the context of systems that interact through the network, ... Read full article.