[Haskell-cafe] Re: Non-technical Haskell question

[Lennart Augustsson]

Ketil Malde wrote:
> John Goerzen <jgoerzen at complete.org> writes:
> 
> 
>>>sensibly share libraries between apps.  Anyway, disc is cheap.
> 
> 
>>Memory not so much, though.  One advantage of having something in .so
>>form is that every instance of every application that uses it shares the
>>same in-memory image of the code.
> 
> 
> Well, a 5 Mbyte [1] overhead isn't really that much, IMHO.  You'd need to
> run a lot of (different; if they're the same, the text will be shared)
> applications to get any measurable benefit.  Eventually, it would be
> nice to have dynamic linkage, but I can see why it isn't a priority.

I find the size of the binaries generated by ghc when I use wxhaskell
totally stupefying.  A considerable time is spent just linking the
final binary.  (The big culprit is that wxhaskell is far to monolithic
so you get all kinds of stuff linked in even if you don't use it.)

I think the lack of dynamic linking of Haskell libraries is a real
shame, and I don't buy the versioning argument.  You can
have enough sefety checks to at least detect versioning problems.

	-- Lennart