o.O I don't think the ghc runtime uses dlopen() to get at gmp (and I'm not sure that would even work in a static binary). You may need to resort to strace to find out what's trying to pull in libgmp.so.whatever. Unless this program is like xmonad and requires ghc behind the scenes to build something, in which case you would indeed need everything that ghc requires (and, of course, ghc itself).