Welcome to RawFilePath, a small part of the Haskell community's effort to purge String for the Greater Good.

With this package, you can interact with the Unix system without the file path encoding issue or the String ↔ ByteString conversion overhead.

Rationale

Traditional String is notorious:

• 24 bytes (three words) required for one character (the List constructor, the actual Char value, and the pointer to the next List constructor). 24x memory consumption.
• Heap fragmentation causing malloc/free overhead
• A lot of pointer chasing for reading, devastating the cache hit rate
• A lot of pointer chasing plus a lot of heap object allocation for manipulation (appending, slicing, etc.)
• Completely unnecessary but mandatory conversions and memory allocation when the data is sent to or received from the outside world

String has another problematic nature to serve as a file path data type: Encoding blindness. All functions that return FilePath would actually take a series of bytes returned by a syscall and somehow magically "decode" it into a String which is surprising because no encoding information was given. Of course there is no magic and it's an abject fail. FilePath just wouldn't work.

Usage

This is the top-level module that re-exports the sub-modules. Therefore, you can

import RawFilePath

to import all functions.