Significant size increase in GHC HEAD's static library sizes

[Herbert Valerio Riedel]

Hello *

While generating .deb packages of various GHC 7.x releases[1] I noticed
a peculiar jump in the resulting binary .deb package for GHC HEAD (about
+50% wrt to GHC 7.6.3); at first I thought this was mostly due to having
enabled shared libaries for that particular package, but then I compared
the .a sizes, and noticed some significant increases in object sizes:

For instance, Cabal's library file jumps to:

   24M  ghc-6.12.3/Cabal-1.8.0.6/libHSCabal-1.8.0.6.a
   27M  ghc-7.0.4/Cabal-1.10.2.0/libHSCabal-1.10.2.0.a
   28M  ghc-7.2.2/Cabal-1.12.0/libHSCabal-1.12.0.a
   27M  ghc-7.4.2/Cabal-1.14.0/libHSCabal-1.14.0.a
   28M  ghc-7.6.3/Cabal-1.16.0/libHSCabal-1.16.0.a
   41M  ghc-7.7.20131018/Cabal-1.18.1.1/libHSCabal-1.18.1.1.a

A similiar increase can be observed for the ghc library:

   56M 6.12.3/lib/ghc-6.12.3/ghc-6.12.3/libHSghc-6.12.3.a
   65M 7.0.4/lib/ghc-7.0.4/ghc-7.0.4/libHSghc-7.0.4.a
   73M 7.2.2/lib/ghc-7.2.2/ghc-7.2.2/libHSghc-7.2.2.a
   78M 7.4.2/lib/ghc-7.4.2/ghc-7.4.2/libHSghc-7.4.2.a
   76M 7.6.3/lib/ghc-7.6.3/ghc-7.6.3/libHSghc-7.6.3.a
  103M head/lib/ghc-7.7.20131018/ghc-7.7.20131018/libHSghc-7.7.20131018.a

But there are other libraries, such as `base` that don't show this kind
of size increase.  I haven't had time to investigate, but I wanted to
report my observation in case somebody has an explanation for this.


 [1]: https://launchpad.net/~hvr/+archive/ghc

Cheers,
  hvr