Bayley, Alistair wrote:
Related to some of the problems Takusen users have had, I have a question about ghci's linker/loader: why does it appear to try to link an entire package archive, rather than just the modules that are used? This is in contrast to the GNU ld program which the compiler uses, which only tries to link modules which are actually used.
Is this a feature or a bug?
Neither really, just a consequence of the design. GHCi's linker only knows how to link object files, and when it links a package it actually linked a specially generated single .o file constructed by linking together all the object files in the package. There has been talk of adding support to link .a files which would simplify package management, but I guess it might make linking slower. If there's a use case that requires partial linking of a package, then we could consider the lack of partial linking a bug - can you describe why you need it? Cheers, Simon