ghc image size

John Meacham john@repetae.net
Fri, 14 Dec 2001 07:44:53 -0800


if you are using GNU tools there is some magic to make them
garbage-collect all the symbols in your executable before outputting the
final code. you have to do some tricks with the segment headers so that
it can GC individual functions but this should fix many of the image
size problems at least in some cases. I agree that the GHC image sizes
are a problem. 
	John

On Fri, Dec 14, 2001 at 01:28:20PM +0100, Jan de Wit wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> > I just recently starting to use the ghc compiler and am astonished by the
> > size of the executables. Out of interest, why are they so large? Is there
> > any work in progress to make the resulting executable/object somewhat more
> > "normal" in size?
> >
> > I read in the Haskell mailing list archives discussions relating to
> reducing
> > the barriers to broader acceptance of functional programming by the
> general
> > programming community (in particular Haskell) - I would regard this as one
> > of these barriers.
> 
> When I want to send compiled Haskell programs by email or put them on the
> web for distribution, I run 'strip' on them and, if I'm on Linux or Win32, I
> run UPX on it as well. UPX is an executable packer, see
> http://upx.sourceforge.net/ for details. This routinely brings programs down
> from over 2 MB to around 250Kb which is small enough for me.
> 
> Hope this helps,
> 
> Jan de Wit
> 
> 
> 
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> 

-- 
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John Meacham - California Institute of Technology, Alum. - john@repetae.net
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