PureScript Foreign vs Argonaut

Until recently, it wasn't clear to me the "right way" to bring foreign data into PureScript.

For a while I was using purescript-foreign. I would get data from outside PureScript, and then use readString, readInt, readArray, etc. to gradually build larger parsers to get an ADT (abstract data type). The paradigm seemed like read[type] functions were being used as building blocks to larger data types.

That paradigm works to a certain extend, but the problem is purescript-foreign doesn't seem to be intended for building larger types. It's meant to bridge the gap between native Javascript types and simple types in PureScript - that is Boolean, Char, String, Number, Int, Array, and native DOM elements. There's some discussion of this in a few purescript-foreign issues: #49, #30

Ultimately the big questions is, how do you get data outside PureScript into PureScript? This is my current understanding:

  1. Are you just converting values between a javascript library and your app? Then use purescript-foreign.

  2. Are the types more complicated and are they from an API? Then use purescript-argonaut or generics-rep. Use argonaut to manually encode/decode, and generic-rep to automatically do so.