Question

The type of sent and received data over network is String, or Bytestring. We can’t send any other types, like Int, or [Bool] for example, because everything passed through a Handle.
I know we can parse it, even using read, but I think it’s not beautiful, nor reliable, and effective as well.

Why was this choice made? Is it because it’s technically “impossible” otherwise, or because Network is just a binding to a C library, because of delays, or because of something else?

Answer 1

The data going over the network is just a stream of bytes. You can assign meaning to that stream of bytes at either endpoint, but on the network it has no meaning. As far as I know, this is true of every language, some just choose to abstract that away in their standard library.

You can encode/decode the data you’re sending with packages like binary or cereal (using the encode and decode functions). Both come with instances of their serialization classes (Binary and Serialize, respectively) for many of the standard types like Int, Double, Bool, and [].