Unfortunately, while that may be the dream, it doesn't work out that way if you want good performance. If you look at the source you'll see that it uses things

Unfortunately, while that may be the dream, it doesn't work out that way if you want good performance. If you look at the source you'll see that it uses things like https://hackage.haskell.org/package/streaming-bytestring-0.3.3/docs/Streaming-ByteString-Char8.html https://hackage.haskell.org/package/streaming-bytestring-0.3... a lot. For one thing, a "string" in Haskell by default is a linked list of unicode characters, so right out of the gate you've got big performance problems if you want to use strings. The exact way laziness is done also has serious performance consequences as well; when dealing with things as small as individual characters all the overhead looms large as a percentage basis. One of the major purposes of any of the several variants of ByteString is to bundle the bytes together, but that means you're back to dealing with chunks. Haskell does end up with a nice API that can abstract over the chunks but it still means you sometimes have to deal with chunks as chunks; if you turn them back into a normal Haskell "string" you lose all the performance advantages. It can still come out fairly nice, but if you want performance it is definitely not just a matter of opening a file and pretending you've just got one big lazy string and you can just ignore all the details; some of the details still poke out.