New InstallShield: no more DLLs

[Reuben Thomas]

> > Also, there is at present an unresolved and
> > deep-seated bug (possibly not even in GHC) that prevents some very simple
> > DLLized programs from working.
> 
> When may Win users expect this bug to be fixed? (A difficult question, I know.)

I've given up on it for the moment; having looked at the source code of ld,
asked on the binutils and Cygwin mailing lists, and a few other things, I
can't work out what the problem is. I do have a few more things to try, but
I don't hold out much hope of fixing it soon without help.

> Although I regard statically linking as much more important than the DLLized
> alternative, dynamically linking is (was?) an important feature of GHC for Win -
> f.e. to safe space when distributing a bunch of EXEs / DLLs build with GHC.

This is only a good idea if you really are distributing several DLLs or EXEs
built with GHC (so that you do get space savings), and even then you have to
ask yourself if it's worth the risk of DLL Hell (which I have suffered from
several times). Disk space is so cheap now that you really have to be hurt
somewhere (e.g. increased download times, decreased performance because of
large unshared binaries) before it's worth dynamic linking (except to
relatively stable system libraries).

-- 
http://sc3d.org/rrt/ | computation, n.  automated pedantry