if you are using GNU tools there is some magic to make them garbage-collect all the symbols in your executable before outputting the final code. you have to do some tricks with the segment headers so that it can GC individual functions but this should fix many of the image size problems at least in some cases. I agree that the GHC image sizes are a problem. John On Fri, Dec 14, 2001 at 01:28:20PM +0100, Jan de Wit wrote:

Hi,

...

I just recently starting to use the ghc compiler and am astonished by the size of the executables. Out of interest, why are they so large? Is there any work in progress to make the resulting executable/object somewhat more "normal" in size?

I read in the Haskell mailing list archives discussions relating to reducing the barriers to broader acceptance of functional programming by the general programming community (in particular Haskell) - I would regard this as one of these barriers.

When I want to send compiled Haskell programs by email or put them on the web for distribution, I run 'strip' on them and, if I'm on Linux or Win32, I run UPX on it as well. UPX is an executable packer, see http://upx.sourceforge.net/ for details. This routinely brings programs down from over 2 MB to around 250Kb which is small enough for me.

Hope this helps,

Jan de Wit

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