enormous executable

[Ketil Malde]

"Simon Marlow" <simonmar@microsoft.com> writes:

> We don't have support for shared libraries under Unix at the moment.  It
> has been investigated at various times in the past, and I believe the
> story is that we couldn't do it without at least losing some performance

Of course, dynamic linking only helps you if you run different
programs[0] using the same library.  My impression was that normally,
Haskell programs link with the run time system and such, and unless
you're running a lot of different Haskell programs, the gains aren't
very large. 

OTOH when you start using and reusing larger libraries, like Gtk+, the
waste accumulates, and it's possibly you don't need to run too many
GTK+HS programs before you see performance decrease due to memory
exhaustion. 

Probably not a big deal in the real world, but it may be occasionally
worth it to take a slight performance decrease to avoid swapping.

-kzm

[0] Multiple instances of the same program share the code segment, of
course. 
-- 
If I haven't seen further, it is by standing in the footprints of giants