GHC status report

[Gergely Risko]

Hi,

On Wed, 30 Apr 2014 17:45:35 +0100, Simon Marlow <marlowsd at gmail.com> writes:

> Dynamic linking has been a huge headache in GHC, and it's not clear
> that it's an overall improvement compared with the static linker.  Now
> that 7.8 is out of the way, it's time to have a conversation about
> whether we want to do dynamic linking again for 7.10, or revert to
> static linking. I think Austin is going to update
> https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/DynamicGhcPrograms, and then
> we'll see where we stand.

Apart from the bugs, which are steadily being fixed (hooray), I have a
little concern about -dynamic-too.  The whole thing is kind of a mess,
that if you forget to use it, then ghci doesn't work and TH doesn't
work.  And cabal used it wrong (maybe now it's getting better).  It also
increases the compilation times.

And of course I get used to it, but I wanted to ask: would it be
possible to change the default compilation method to be only dynamic?
If we have only dynamic objects, can we still build a static executable
(I mean haskelly half static: libc and libgmp is dynamic, but the
haskell libs are not shared, so as of now)?

If I remember correctly when I do gcc + ld for a simple C project, it's
enough to decide ld time if I'm building a shared or a static executable.

But maybe I'm oversimplifying something...

Gergely