Linking in Dead Code

[Daniel Fischer]

On Friday 13 May 2011 13:04:14, Guy wrote:
> If only 1% of an imported module is used, GHC will link in the entire
> module.

With split-objs, as far as I know, GHC only links in what you use (plus the 
module initialiser).

split-objs was disabled for some GHC/OS X combinations recently,
http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/4013 and 5008, maybe that 
applies to you, otherwise building GHC with object-splitting enabled and 
all libraries with split-objs should reduce code size significantly.

Linking still tends to use a lot of memory with ld, on the appropriate 
platforms you could try using gold as the linker, that's reported to use 
less memory (and be faster).

> Are there any plans, or at least some ideas, to rectify this?
> One severe example of this is qtHaskell, where importing the top-level
> module causes glacial compile (actually link) times and huge
> executables. Strip can fix the executable size (why does GHC not do
> this automatically?), but linking remains a problem.
>