A compact representation suitable for storing short byte strings in memory.

In typical use cases it can be imported alongside Data.ByteString, e.g.

import qualified Data.ByteString       as B
import qualified Data.ByteString.Short as B
         (ShortByteString, toShort, fromShort)

Other ShortByteString operations clash with Data.ByteString or Prelude functions however, so they should be imported qualified with a different alias e.g.

import qualified Data.ByteString.Short as B.Short

With GHC, the memory overheads are as follows, expressed in words and in bytes (words are 4 and 8 bytes on 32 or 64bit machines respectively).

• ByteString unshared: 9 words; 36 or 72 bytes.
• ByteString shared substring: 5 words; 20 or 40 bytes.
• ShortByteString: 4 words; 16 or 32 bytes.

For the string data itself, both ShortByteString and ByteString use one byte per element, rounded up to the nearest word. For example, including the overheads, a length 10 ShortByteString would take 16 + 12 = 28 bytes on a 32bit platform and 32 + 16 = 48 bytes on a 64bit platform.

These overheads can all be reduced by 1 word (4 or 8 bytes) when the ShortByteString or ByteString is unpacked into another constructor.

For example:

data ThingId = ThingId {-# UNPACK #-} !Int
                       {-# UNPACK #-} !ShortByteString

This will take 1 + 1 + 3 words (the ThingId constructor + unpacked Int + unpacked ShortByteString), plus the words for the string data.

With GHC, the ByteString representation uses pinned memory, meaning it cannot be moved by the GC. This is usually the right thing to do for larger strings, but for small strings using pinned memory can lead to heap fragmentation which wastes space. The ShortByteString type (and the Text type from the text package) use unpinned memory so they do not contribute to heap fragmentation. In addition, with GHC, small unpinned strings are allocated in the same way as normal heap allocations, rather than in a separate pinned area.