Blaze.ByteString.Builder

Builders denote sequences of bytes. They are Monoids where mempty is the zero-length sequence and mappend is concatenation, which runs in O(1).

Flush the current buffer. This introduces a chunk boundary.

Execute a Builder and return the generated chunks as a LazyByteString. The work is performed lazy, i.e., only when a chunk of the LazyByteString is forced.

Run a Builder with the given buffer sizes.

Use this function for integrating the Builder type with other libraries that generate lazy bytestrings.

Note that the builders should guarantee that on average the desired chunk size is attained. Builders may decide to start a new buffer and not completely fill the existing buffer, if this is faster. However, they should not spill too much of the buffer, if they cannot compensate for it.

FIXME: Note that the following paragraphs are not entirely correct as of blaze-builder-0.4:

A call toLazyByteStringWith bufSize minBufSize firstBufSize will generate a lazy bytestring according to the following strategy. First, we allocate a buffer of size firstBufSize and start filling it. If it overflows, we allocate a buffer of size minBufSize and copy the first buffer to it in order to avoid generating a too small chunk. Finally, every next buffer will be of size bufSize. This, slow startup strategy is required to achieve good speed for short (<200 bytes) resulting bytestrings, as for them the allocation cost is of a large buffer cannot be compensated. Moreover, this strategy also allows us to avoid spilling too much memory for short resulting bytestrings.

Note that setting firstBufSize >= minBufSize implies that the first buffer is no longer copied but allocated and filled directly. Hence, setting firstBufSize = bufSize means that all chunks will use an underlying buffer of size bufSize. This is recommended, if you know that you always output more than minBufSize bytes.

Run the builder to construct a strict bytestring containing the sequence of bytes denoted by the builder. This is done by first serializing to a lazy bytestring and then packing its chunks to a appropriately sized strict bytestring.

toByteString = packChunks . toLazyByteString

Note that toByteString is a Monoid homomorphism.

toByteString mempty          == mempty
toByteString (x `mappend` y) == toByteString x `mappend` toByteString y

However, in the second equation, the left-hand-side is generally faster to execute.

toByteStringIOWith bufSize io b runs the builder b with a buffer of at least the size bufSize and executes the IO action io whenever the buffer is full.

Compared to toLazyByteStringWith this function requires less allocation, as the output buffer is only allocated once at the start of the serialization and whenever something bigger than the current buffer size has to be copied into the buffer, which should happen very seldomly for the default buffer size of 32kb. Hence, the pressure on the garbage collector is reduced, which can be an advantage when building long sequences of bytes.

A write of a bounded number of bytes.

When defining a function write :: a -> Write for some a, then it is important to ensure that the bound on the number of bytes written is data-independent. Formally,

 forall x y. getBound (write x) = getBound (write y)

The idea is that this data-independent bound is specified such that the compiler can optimize the check, if there are enough free bytes in the buffer, to a single subtraction between the pointer to the next free byte and the pointer to the end of the buffer with this constant bound of the maximal number of bytes to be written.

Create a builder that execute a single Write.

Construct a Builder writing a list of data one element at a time.

Run a Write to produce a strict ByteString. This is equivalent to (toByteString . fromWrite), but is more efficient because it uses just one appropriately-sized buffer.