Compiling DynFlags is jolly slow

[Ian Lynagh]

On Thu, Jan 31, 2013 at 12:23:02PM -0000, GHC wrote:
> 
>  I can't compile `DynFlags` on my 256MB Raspberry Pi.  Could we do
>  something about having less auto-generated code in this module please?
> 
> -- 
> Ticket URL: <http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/7258#comment:13>

The ticket's really about performance problems in the compiler rather
than DynFlags in particular, so moving to the list.

Even the non-generated code in DynFlags is quite large, and ungainly to
edit. What would you think about splitting it up, perhaps moving
DumpFlag, GeneralFlag and WarningFlag into separate modules?

Ideally each module would also export a [Flag (CmdLineP DynFlags)],
which would then be ++ed together in DynFlags, but I'm not sure if
that's possible without making the modules mutually recursive. On the
other hand, perhaps there's a way to split it up which would remove the
need for (some of) the existing import loops; I'm not sure how feasible
that is OTTOMH.


Thanks
Ian