The reason for non-GHC boot dependencies

[Andreas Klebinger]

I think they could be statically linked. But those boot libraries don't
change much and generally
don't really cause us nor users pain so it seems like there is little
reason to do so to me.

 > Surely the size of binaries can't be the only concern, otherwise we'd
use upx¹ on them when distributing them.

I believe Ben experimented with executable compression tools in the past
with little success.
But there were segfaults, executables being flagged by antivirus and
perhaps more issues I forgot
which just made using it unrealistic at the time.

But perhaps the tooling has matured in the meantime.

Since our distributions are already compressed purely for *distribution*
purposes I would expect the gains there to be rather slim anyway.

So it's not really that we don't care about size, just that these tools
seemed not reliable enough for the benefits they offer in the past.

Am 10/07/2024 um 11:01 schrieb Hécate via ghc-devs:
> Hi devs,
>
> I had a chat earlier today with someone and found myself unable to
> explain the reason why GHC came with boot dependencies like xhtml,
> that are dependencies of Haddock and HPC.
>
> Obviously, the binaries are (haskell-)dynamically linked when
> distributed, but what is the reason why haddock, hpc, etc can't be
> (haskell-)statically linked when distributed?
>
> Surely the size of binaries can't be the only concern, otherwise we'd
> use upx¹ on them when distributing them.
>
> Cheers,
>
> Hécate
>
>
> 1: https://upx.github.io
>