#9577: String literals are wasting space -------------------------------------+------------------------------------- Reporter: xnyhps | Owner: xnyhps Type: bug | Status: new Priority: low | Milestone: Component: Compiler | Version: 7.8.2 (NCG) | Keywords: Resolution: | Architecture: Unknown/Multiple Operating System: | Difficulty: Unknown Unknown/Multiple | Blocked By: Type of failure: Runtime | Related Tickets: performance bug | Test Case: | Blocking: | Differential Revisions: | -------------------------------------+------------------------------------- Comment (by dfeuer): Replying to [comment:12 rwbarton]:
I think this is easy to do as far as the linker side of things is concerned (just put the exceptional strings in their own section); the only bit that might be tricky is identifying which string literals should be considered exceptional and plumbing that information through the compiler.
I think identifying them shouldn't be too hard (in enough cases to be useful)—they're not exported and they appear only as arguments to `error` or possibly other exception-raising functions. I say possibly because I imagine there may be situations where exceptions that carry strings may need to be handled quickly. I imagine, however, that in those cases the strings themselves may not be inspected. Another thought is that there's probably an open source or public domain block compression algorithm that can fit in a few hundred bytes of slow assembly to access a compressed error string region. Such a thing should of course be optional if we decide to do it. -- Ticket URL: http://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/9577#comment:14 GHC http://www.haskell.org/ghc/ The Glasgow Haskell Compiler