[Haskell-beginners] Haskell exectuable size

[Magnus Therning]

On Tue, Sep 03, 2013 at 03:53:12PM +0400, Dmitry Vyal wrote:
> On 09/03/2013 02:45 PM, Nathan Hüsken wrote:
> > I have written a small wxHaskell application. Since wxWidgets
> seems to be required to be linked dynamicly, I have to add the
> wxWidgets dlls. Those make a total of about 25MB, wow.
> >
> > Now the compiled exe (compiled with ghc -O2) has size 15MB.
> > In total I am at about 50Mb, which is just to much.
> >
> > Why is the exe so big?
> > Has anyone a suggestion on how to reduce the total size?
> Bindings for large C libraries contain a great number of Haskell
> wrapper functions for C functions.  Looks like GHC is not terribly
> efficient in terms of size of generated code. Your tiny application
> gets statically linked with a huge haskell library which in turn
> dynamically linked with C library doing the actual work.
> 
> In case you're having multiply haskell binaries using wxWidgets you
> can use GHC's dynamic linking feature. http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/7.6.3/html/users_guide/using-shared-libs.html.
> This way actual binaries would be small but would have an additional
> run-time dependency.
> 
> And my question. Does GHC try to exclude unused symbols from Haskell
> libraries it links to application code?

I'm under the impresssion that '--enable-split-objs' enables the
linker to exclude unused symbols/functions when linking to application
code.  I may be completely wrong though.

/M

-- 
Magnus Therning                      OpenPGP: 0xAB4DFBA4 
email: magnus at therning.org   jabber: magnus at therning.org
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