The io-streams library contains simple and easy to use primitives for I/O using streams. Based on simple types with one type parameter (InputStream a and OutputStream a), io-streams provides a basic interface to side-effecting input and output in IO monad with the following features:

• three fundamental I/O primitives that anyone can understand: read :: InputStream a -> IO (Maybe a), unRead :: a -> InputStream a -> IO (), and write :: Maybe a -> OutputStream a -> IO ().

• simple types and side-effecting IO operations mean straightforward and simple exception handling and resource cleanup using standard Haskell facilities like bracket.

• code to transform files, handles, and sockets to streams

• a variety of combinators for wrapping and transforming streams, including compression and decompression using zlib, controlling precisely how many bytes are read to or written from a socket, buffering output using blaze-builder, etc.

• support for parsing from streams using attoparsec.