long constant list of pairs (was Re: Ways and Build Tags for Optimisation)

4. Re: Ways and Build Tags for Optimisation (Ashley Yakeley)

From: Ashley Yakeley Subject: Re: Ways and Build Tags for Optimisation Date: Thu, 29 May 2003 20:40:59 -0700

Sorry for replying from a digest. (Replying from the archive is not better, is it?)

Inside the module is an "Array Char String" created from a "[(Char,String)]" that is a long list of Unicode character names.

We had very long compilation times when optimization or profiling was switched on, for a [(String, Int)] list with about 5000 entries. We worked around the problem by changing the list into a String (escaping doublequotes) and using "read" to convert it to a list. (Eventually we converted it to a Map.)

...

getCharacterName '\x189F'

"MONGOLIAN LETTER MANCHU ALI GALI DDHA"

We had latin1 characters in our strings. Cheers Christian

For some reason, even though only getCharacterName is exported, when optimisation is switched on, the interface file balloons a thousandfold:

$ ls -l UnicodeNames.*hi -rw-r--r-- 1 ashley ashley 5854480 May 28 02:49 UnicodeNames.hi -rw-r--r-- 1 ashley ashley 5854497 May 28 06:56 UnicodeNames.p_hi -rw-r--r-- 1 ashley ashley 2385 May 28 15:59 UnicodeNames.q_hi

What's the best way to stop this? Is it reasonable to simply switch off profiling just for these few files?

Also, I'd like to make all that data disappear when a binary program that doesn't use it is stripped; currently it doesn't. Any ideas?