[Haskell-cafe] Re: Hmm, what license to use?

On Fri, Oct 3, 2008 at 12:59 PM, Simon Marlow wrote:

Magnus Therning wrote:

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On Wed, Oct 1, 2008 at 6:03 PM, Simon Marlow wrote: [..]

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Dynamic linking doesn't solve all the problems, we still have the problem that GHC does a lot of cross-module inlining, regardless of whether dynamic linking is used. However, I really would like to have a way to have complete control over what is exposed across a package boundary. We need this not just for licensing reasons, but also for making a dynamic library with a fixed ABI, so it can be upgraded later.

I have a really hard time following this. Are you seriously saying that GHC is inlining code from modules _and_ link dynamically at the same time. That seems like a remarkably strange thing to do, or maybe I'm just missing something.

That's exactly what would happen, if we shipped dynamic linking support with GHC as it stands. It's just a linking mechanism, an alternative to static linking, and has no impact on the amount or nature of inter-module optimisation that GHC does.

Ah, now I understand. The object for GHC would be to reduce the system-wide use of memory rather than substitutability of DLLs then, right? Why would it be interesting to have sharable objects without substitutability? /M -- Magnus Therning (OpenPGP: 0xAB4DFBA4) magnus＠therning．org Jabber: magnus＠therning．org http://therning.org/magnus identi.ca|twitter: magthe