[Yhc] Prelude.hs is there anything I can remove to make it smaller?

[Tom Shackell]

Hi Alexis,

Are you still using the approach we discussed earlier of separating yhi 
into a bytecode loader and a separate interpreter? For example where the 
bytecode is first converted into C source code and then compiled and 
linked directly against the interpreter?

The advantage of doing it that way is that yhi only loads functions that 
are referenced by the main program. If something is in the Prelude but 
your main function could never reach it then it isn't loaded. If you 
were using yhi to generate C source code then this means it would only 
generate the minimum code needed to run the program.

That said, I would imagine there might still be a *lot* of opportunities 
for trimming down the prelude. Error message functions pull in functions 
to write strings to stdout, for example. Since you can't print anything 
there's no point in having them. Similarly it's easy to end up pulling 
in the Show instances, but again they're not likely to be of much to you.

Probably your best bet is to use the "yhi generating C code" approach, 
take a small example and see what it generates. From that you can work 
out what things it's including that are not useful for your purposes and 
replace them in the Prelude with empty declarations.

Hope that helps :-)


Tom



Alexis Morris wrote:
> Hi all,
> 
> I am attempting to load up yhi on the Lego NXT, but I have several 
> questions about the main startup files that need to be there. In 
> particular I am referring to Prelude.hbc, _Driver.hbc, Primitive.hbc, 
> and the user created mainMod.hbc. Based on reading the sequence in the 
> main.c file these are all that are needed to start a simple program (say 
> Hello World). I plan to put several of these into a hash table and send 
> them over to the waiting NXT where I will then load from memory.
> 
> The problem is that I have a limited amount of memory (100KB left in ROM 
> and 64KB in RAM) for loading in files and I note that Primitive.hbc is 
> actually 139KB. I am curious about whether there's anything in 
> Prelude.hs that can be safely removed...some really obscure functions, 
> if any...
> 
> Any ideas?
> 
> Cheers and thanks,
> -- 
> </Alexis>
> 
> 
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Yhc mailing list
> Yhc at haskell.org
> http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/yhc