--out-implib when linking shared libraries

Hi, I've just built a Haskell dll on Windows. As part of the process it generated an 14Mb foo.dll, and a 40Mb foo.dll.a. Looking at the flags passed to ld I see --out-implib=foo.dll.a. What is the purpose of the .a file? What might it be needed for? Is it possible to suppress it? I could easily be building 100 of these things and 4Gb of disk for unused files is a little painful. Thanks Neil