On behalf of the Data.Text team, I am delighted to announce the release of preview versions of two new packages:

text 0.1

Fast, packed Unicode text support, using a modern stream fusion framework.

text-icu 0.1

Augments the text package with comprehensive character set conversion support and normalization (and soon more), via bindings to the ICU library.

These packages fill out critical pieces of functionality for the Haskell platform, without compromising on either performance or safety. Stream fusion offers the possibility of writing text manipulation code in a clean, high-level way, with intermediate allocations and traversals being fused away.

We are referring to these as preview releases because although the text package in particular has been quite heavily tested, it has not been thoroughly tuned, and we have not yet implemented a chunked lazy text representation suitable for streaming gigabytes of data. The APIs are pretty conventional, but are still subject to change.

If you want to contribute, please get copies of the source trees from here: