These are statically allocated literals. I have a hard time believing

#5218: Add unpackCStringLen# to create Strings from string literals -------------------------------------+------------------------------------- Reporter: tibbe | Owner: thoughtpolice Type: feature request | Status: patch Priority: normal | Milestone: Component: Compiler | Version: 7.0.3 Resolution: | Keywords: strings Operating System: Unknown/Multiple | Architecture: Type of failure: Runtime | Unknown/Multiple performance bug | Test Case: Blocked By: | Blocking: Related Tickets: #5877 #10064 | Differential Rev(s): Phab:D2443 #11312, #9719 | Wiki Page: | -------------------------------------+------------------------------------- Comment (by bgamari): that a one-word increase in binary size for each string literal will make a noticeable difference to GHC's binary sizes. Okay, I ran a quick experiment, compiling GHC with `-ddump-simpl` and grepping for primitive strings in the result. The result is merely ~30000 string literals. As I said earlier, a good fraction of these are short, so the relative change in space needed by string literals is rather large. However, compared to the rest of the program, it's quite small: each literal blowing up by a word would be around 250kB. -- Ticket URL: http://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/5218#comment:95 GHC http://www.haskell.org/ghc/ The Glasgow Haskell Compiler