More fun with Haskell-in-the-large: linking time has become the main bottleneck in our development cycle. The standard solution would be to use an incremental linker, but it seems that gnu does not yet support this:-|

Hmm, I've never heard of linking being a bottleneck. Even GHC itself links in about 3-4 seconds here. One common problem is that linking on a network filesystem takes a *lot* longer than linking objects from a local disk. It's always a good idea to keep the build tree on the local disk, even if the sources are NFS-mounted.

Alternative a: use someone else's incremental linker, e.g., Sun's ild (ghc's -pgml option appears to have its own idea about option formatting, btw) - this doesn't seem to work - should it?

You'd probably want to call the incremental linker directly rather than using GHC - what exactly does it do, BTW? What files does it generate?

Alternative b: convince ghc to link objects in stages, e.g., on a per-directory basis - gnu's ld seems to support at least this kind of partial linking (-i/-r). Not quite as nice as a fully incremental linker, but would probably save our day..

Yes, this works fine. We use it to build the libraries for GHCi. Cheers, Simon