Packed Data Support in Haskell

https://arthi-chaud.github.io/posts/packed/

77•matt_d•11mo ago

Comments

nine_k•11mo ago

> Introducing the ‘packed’ data format, a binary format that allows using data as it is, without the need for a deserialisation step. A notable perk of this format is that traversals on packed trees is proven to be faster than on ‘unpacked’ trees: as the fields of data structures are inlines, there are no pointer jumps, thus making the most of the L1 cache.

That is, a "memory dump -> zero-copy memory read" of a subgraph of Haskell objects, allowing to pass such trees / subgraphs directly over a network. Slightly reminiscent of Cap'n Proto.

90s_dev•11mo ago

We are always reinventing wheels. If we didn't, they'd all still be made of wood.

Zolomon•11mo ago

They mention this in the article.

spockz•11mo ago

It reminds me more of flat buffers though. Does protobuf also have zero allocation (beyond initial ingestion) and no pointer jumps?

cstrahan•11mo ago

No, one example of why being variable sized integers.

See https://protobuf.dev/programming-guides/encoding/

carterschonwald•11mo ago

One thing that sometimes gets tricky in these things is handling Sub term sharing. I wonder how they implemented it.

tlb•11mo ago

> the serialised version of the data is usually bigger than its in-memory representation

I don’t think this is common. Perhaps for arrays of floats serialized as JSON or something. But I can’t think of a case where binary serialization is bigger. Data types like maps are necessarily larger in memory to support fast lookup and mutability.

nine_k•11mo ago

I suppose all self-describing formats, like protobuf, or thrift or, well, JSON are bigger than the efficient machine representation, because they carry the schema in every message, one way or another.

IsTom•11mo ago

If you use a lot of sharing in immutable data it can grow a lot when serializing. A simple pathological example would be a tree that has all left subtrees same as the right ones. It takes O(height) space in memory, but O(2^height) when serialized.

gitroom•11mo ago

honestly i wish more stuff worked this way - fewer hops in memory always makes me happy

lordleft•11mo ago

This was very well written. Excellent article!

NetOpWibby•11mo ago

Is this like MessagePack for Haskell?

Got an Old Kindle? It Might Not Work Anymore

2,100 Swiss municipalities showing which provider handles their official email

Vercel hack – an old fashioned honey pot?

NVFP4 on Nvidia DGX Spark is slower than FP8 on the same model

Ultimate Guide to Vibe Coding

Ukraine Moves to Replace Frontline Soldiers with 25,000 Ground Robots

Headless Everything for Personal AI

Fear and Loathing Among the Haves and Have Mores in San Francisco

Interview with 0.1x Engineer [video]

Banned by Anthropic

Show HN: Turn your PCB into a Minecraft world

Ex-CEO, ex-CFO of bankrupt AI company charged with fraud

US Draft Update: Major Tech Company Urges Universal National Service

Cathode Ray Tube Memory (RAM)

Audit Tool for Vercel Exposure of Environment Variables

Improving Office+Photoshop+Fusion on Linux with Adversarial Drinking

Is Prolog Worth Learning?

Claude UI Feature Request

Reminder: Enable ZRAM on your Linux system to optimize RAM usage

Aliens.gov will be running as a WordPress multisite

Show HN: Developerpod, K-Cups for Code

Fuse Shared Libraries into ELFs

Claude Design(ed) Numble.today

Ask HN: Has AI impacted entry-level programming skills?

Trial by Fire: Crisis Engineering

Show HN: A font that auto-translates Chinese

suckmore.org – Software that sucks more

Why do language models feel worse even as benchmarks improve? [pdf]

LoRa

Cursor in talks to raise $2B round at valuation of over $50B