In the windows version of ghc, there seems to be the possiblity to compile the libraries as shared 'dll's. Is the same possible for the unix version?
The question is because I think the ghc executables are really blown up. A simple 'Hello, world' has 358 KBytes and the hello example of the GTK+ bindings is as big as 2.2 MBytes, although it is link dynamically against:
358K looks a bit large: is that stripped? I normally see a 150K-ish minimum. Most of that is the runtime system and garbage collector. To answer your question: we don't currently have a way to make shared libraries for Haskell code on Unix boxes. I've made various attempts at this in the past and didn't have much success - take a look back through the glasgow-haskell-{users,bugs} archives for some more info on the topic. BTW, shared libraries aren't that big a deal. You won't see any memory savings unless you've got several Haskell programs running, and there would certainly be a performance hit. Also, there wouldn't be any of the other "hot-swappable" advantages you normally get with shared libraries, because GHC-compiled Haskell libraries tend to have a much more intimate relationship with each other than C libraries. Cheers, Simon