Haskell allows you to build a (lazy) linked list of characters sourced in blocks from strict ByteStrings, which are pointers to bytes with an offset and length.

Haskell allows you to build a (lazy) linked list of characters sourced in blocks from strict ByteStrings, which are pointers to bytes with an offset and length. Leaving out the garbage collection of the cons cells (I would hope that the cons cells are reused in some situations, but I don't know the specifics), I think this is quite a nice interface. iolist sounds like lazy ByteStrings in Haskell. They are lists of strict ByteStrings.