[Haskell-beginners] GHC-generated executables size

[Gaius Hammond]

On 15 Oct 2010, at 21:37, Christian Gosch wrote:

> Hi,
> I was playing around with ghc again, and I was wondering what makes
> the executables so large and how I could make them smaller (strip  
> works,
> but is there anything more I can do?)
> More specifically, I am compiling a program that uses the GTK+  
> bindings,
> HDBC, and some things from Prelude.
> The program simply displays a window, and reads and writes values
> from/into a data base file. Not much, really.
> Anyway, the program size is 20MB without stripping, and 10MB after
> stripping ...



A Haskell program needs to schlep around a runtime with it. So when  
you compare it to say a Java program, you need to compare it to the  
size of  a  JAR + the size of the VM, and in that case the size isn't  
so extraordinary. So that is the "why", as to the "what can you do"  
probably not much that you've not already tried, other than supplying  
your program as a script for #!/usr/bin/runghc



http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/6.12.2/html/users_guide/runghc.html



That would mean your program wasn't so self-contained, as the target  
machine would also need to have all the "stuff" that you have compiled  
in, e.g. the HDBC development package.



Cheers,




G