Wolfgang Thaller wrote:
Brian Strand wrote:
Not being intimately familiar with ghc internals, I don't know how much work this is, and whether the implementation cost exceeds the benefit (easier installation for Haskell novices like me).
My guess is that for GHC, it won't work; the .hc files are really too low-level. Just about the only thing that's not already decided in the .hc files (that I can think of now) is the actual names of the libraries that the app links to. We'd need to supply .hc files for nearly as many platforms as we need binaries for. So maybe x86-Linux needs a ghc binary with as few library dependencies as possible, to facilitate bootstrapping on different Linux distros?
That seems like a very good idea to me; for bootstrapping, one doesn't need ghci, readline, ncurses, etc. From "ldd ghc-6.4.20050221", it looks like the only really essential non-libc library is libgmp (which I'm guessing is used for Integer operations at least, and these are hard to do without...).