On Friday 13 May 2011 13:04:14, Guy wrote:
If only 1% of an imported module is used, GHC will link in the entire module.
With split-objs, as far as I know, GHC only links in what you use (plus the module initialiser). split-objs was disabled for some GHC/OS X combinations recently, http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ticket/4013 and 5008, maybe that applies to you, otherwise building GHC with object-splitting enabled and all libraries with split-objs should reduce code size significantly. Linking still tends to use a lot of memory with ld, on the appropriate platforms you could try using gold as the linker, that's reported to use less memory (and be faster).
Are there any plans, or at least some ideas, to rectify this? One severe example of this is qtHaskell, where importing the top-level module causes glacial compile (actually link) times and huge executables. Strip can fix the executable size (why does GHC not do this automatically?), but linking remains a problem.