[Haskell-cafe] Re: Non-technical Haskell question

[Jules Bean]

On 6 Dec 2004, at 17:29, John Goerzen wrote:

>
> That is an excellent point.  Who would use an ls or cp that requires
> 10MB of RAM, especially on embedded devices?
>

This is presumably just because we don't have 'smart' linking, so the 
whole library is bundled in. I imagine in principle smart linking would 
be possible...
>

> optimization.  I for one think that the performance benefit we see from
> that is more than offset by the inconvenience.  If it were at least 
> made
> an option, then a lot of other options would become available to us,
> too.
>

I imageine that turning off cross-module inlining could be catastrophic 
for performance in certain cases. C++ solves this problem by defining 
all its inlinable functions in the interface rather than the 
implementation. Conceivably a clever compiler could still do inlining 
in one direction, and produce a dynamically linked executable, I 
suppose.

Jules