What is pipes/conduit trying to solve

Question

I have seen people recommending pipes/conduit library for various lazy IO related tasks. What problem do these libraries solve exactly?

Also, when I try to use some hack

Answer 1

Here's a great podcast with authors of both libraries:

http://www.haskellcast.com/episode/006-gabriel-gonzalez-and-michael-snoyman-on-pipes-and-conduit/

It'll answer most of your questions.

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In short, both of those libraries approach the problem of streaming, which is very important when dealing with IO. In essence they manage transferring of data in chunks, thus allowing you to e.g. transfer a 1GB file cosuming just 64KB of RAM on both the server and the client. Without streaming you would have had to allocate as much memory on both ends.

An older alternative to those libraries is lazy IO, but it is filled with issues and makes applications error-prone. Those issues are discussed in the podcast.

Concerning which one of those libraries to use, it's more of a matter of taste. I prefer "pipes". The detailed differences are discussed in the podcast too.