[Haskell-cafe] GHC optimisations

[Andrew Coppin]

Does GHC do dead code elimination?

I observe that if you take a module and edit it so that some function is 
now no longer exported or called by any exported function, the size of 
the *.o file seems to go down. This suggests that dead code within a 
single module is eliminated.

However... how about this?

  module Foo where

  f = ...
  g = ...
  h = ...

  module Main where

  import Foo

  main = ...f...

Will the generated executable contain the code for g and h, even though 
they aren't called? Or does the unused code get eliminated? How about 
the standard libraries?



I read somewhere that if one funtion returns a tuple, and the caller 
immediately extracts the values from the tuple, GHC tries to optimise 
away the tuple - so it's as if the function can just return multiple 
values at once. Is this true? Does it apply only to tuples, or to all types?