This module provide CBytes with some useful instances / functions, A CBytes is a wrapper for immutable null-terminated string. The main design target of this type is to ease the bridging of C FFI APIs, since most of the unix APIs use null-terminated string. On windows you're encouraged to use a compatibility layer like 'WideCharToMultiByte/MultiByteToWideChar' and keep the same interface, e.g. libuv do this when deal with file paths.

We neither guarantee to store length info, nor support O(1) slice for CBytes: This will defeat the purpose of null-terminated string which is to save memory, We do save the length if it's created on GHC heap though. If you need advance editing, convert a CBytes to Bytes with toBytes and use vector combinators. Use fromBytes to convert it back.

It can be used with OverloadedString, literal encoding is UTF-8 with some modifications: NUL char is encoded to 'C0 80', and '\xD800' ~ '\xDFFF' is encoded as a three bytes normal utf-8 codepoint. This is also how ghc compile string literal into binaries, thus we can use rewrite-rules to construct CBytes value in O(1) without wasting runtime heap.

Note most of the unix API is not unicode awared though, you may find a scandir call return a filename which is not proper encoded in any unicode encoding at all. But still, UTF-8 is recommanded to be used everywhere, and we use UTF-8 assumption in various places, such as displaying CBytes and literals encoding above.