It's easily avoided: Just never use the lazy I/O functions. (Not sure if hlint perhaps has a warning you can apply here. It probably should.) There are real no

It's easily avoided: Just never use the lazy I/O functions. (Not sure if hlint perhaps has a warning you can apply here. It probably should.) There are real non-brittle solutions to streaming I/O, pipes[1], conduit[2], or io-streams[3] being the most popular AFAICT. (The latter is probably the easiest to use, but is somewhat less 'composable' than the other two, especially if you have monad transformer stacks, etc.) Either that, or just use strict I/O if you're just working with smallish files. Essentially lazy I/O was a mistake that's unfortunately very hard to fix nowadays without presumably breaking a lot of working-but-potentially-brittle code. Perhaps the time is ripe for starting to actually deprecate them officially... at least almost everyone in the Haskell community seems to agree that it was a mistake and they are a constant trap for newbies. [1] http://hackage.haskell.org/package/pipes http://hackage.haskell.org/package/pipes [2] https://hackage.haskell.org/package/conduit https://hackage.haskell.org/package/conduit [3] https://hackage.haskell.org/package/io-streams https://hackage.haskell.org/package/io-streams