Somebody claiming to be Ian Lynagh wrote:
GHC HEAD now has support for using dynamic libraries by default (and in particular, using dynamic libraries and the system linker in GHCi) for a number of platforms.
The various issues are described in a wiki page here: http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/DynamicByDefault
IIRC, one of the problems with dynamic linking in GHC is that when the GHC version is different, the ABI can often be different enough to making such shared libraries incompatible with each other / binaries made on different GHCs. This makes distribution a potential nightmare (where you have to package all the *.so files and send them along with your binary, which is essentially the same as static linking, but more pain). Is this no longer the case, or am I completely misremembering this? Also, you say "for a number of platforms" and that wiki page says "Currently, we don't know how to do dynamic-by-default on Windows in a satisfactory way." So I assume Windows is not one of the platforms that would be seeing this change? -- Stephen Paul Weber, @singpolyma See http://singpolyma.net for how I prefer to be contacted edition right joseph