--split-objs

[Simon Marlow]

On 19/12/2013 03:00, Mikhail Glushenkov wrote:
> The problem in https://github.com/haskell/cabal/issues/1611 is with
> that we have a module (say, A) from which we're only importing a
> single value, and this module is a part of the cabal-install source
> tree. It would be nice if the whole contents of A weren't linked with
> the final executable. So I tried to compile cabal-install with
> --split-objs, but apparently this doesn't work because in this case
> the linker's input is A.o instead of A_split_0.o A_split_1.o ...
> A_split_N.o. And apparently that's why the documentation says that
> "--split-objs doesn't make sense for executables".
>
> Note that if cabal-install was split into an executable and a library,
> then this would work.
>
> So the question is why --split-objs only works for libraries and
> whether this behaviour can be fixed.

There is nothing fundamental about -split-objs that prevents it from 
working with executables.  I expect that GHC doesn't take it into 
account during its link step when linking an executable with 
-split-objs, though.  That would be a reasonable enhancement - open a 
ticket?

Cheers,
	Simon