David R. MacIver's Blog

SBinary 0.2

I quietly uploaded SBinary 0.2 last night. I was going to write up some documentation for it today and do an official announcement, but it’s now coming up to 19:00 and I still haven’t written any documentation so I have a sneaking suspicion it ain’t happening today. So, if you want to have a play with it there’s a new jar and scaladoc up there.

Changes from 0.1:

• Improved API which is less closely tied to java.io
• Supports a wider range of collections and standard types (not the entire standard library as I’d originally said I was going to do. There are some issues surrounding collections and open unions which I want to resolve before I do that).
• A limited amount of support for lazy IO using Stream. (Specifically, Stream is read lazily from an input. However there are a lot of limitations on this at the moment). The design is such that it should be impossible to incorrectly interleave IO actions (i.e. reading something else from the input will force pending lazy reads to complete).
• Improved some performance stupidities (nonbuffered reading/writing to files, unspecialised reading/writing of byte arrays)
• Improved generic combinators for building binary instances (although the “case classes for free” one I want to add is waiting on a compiler bug before I can add it)

I hope to write up some proper documentation soon, and when I do I’ll send an announcement to the mailing list. In the meantime, feel free to have a play.