[apologies to anybody who sees the rather similar message I posted to caml-list...]
How does Haskell (ghc) compare with languages like O'Caml, C and C++ for executable size? How big is the runtime library?
Are there any easily-identifiable, non-obvious, factors that affect executable size (I'm talking about end-use factors, rather those resulting from the design decisions taken by the language designers and implementors)?
I currently use Python by preference, but I'm interested in a language (other than C/C++!) that doesn't depend on a big runtime library and generates "reasonably" small executables -- modems are here to stay for a while yet.
We do our best to keep the executable sizes down, but the fact is that GHC binaries are mostly statically linked, so they're going to be large. There's a FAQ entry on static vs. dynamic linking if you're interested. It might be possible to implement dynamic linking these days, because one of the obstacles that prevented it in the past was removed in GHC 6.0 (as a result of eval/apply, we no longer need to identify the extents of text segments in the address space). Cheers, Simon