Abraham Egnor
This is something I just noticed...
hello.hs: module Main(main) where
main = putStr "Hello world!\n"
hello.c: #include
int main(void) { printf("Hello world!\n"); return 0; }
[abe@shiva:~/src/test] $ ghc hello.hs -o hello_hs [abe@shiva:~/src/test] $ gcc hello.c -o hello_c [abe@shiva:~/src/test] $ ls -l hello_* -rwxr-xr-x 1 abe engy 13712 Jul 18 11:34 hello_c -rwxr-xr-x 1 abe engy 299900 Jul 18 11:33 hello_hs
Why is the binary made by ghc 20 times bigger than the one made by gcc?
I don't know for certain, but I've got a couple of guesses: 1. hello_hs is probably statically linked. hello_c is probably dynamically linked. 2. "Hello world!\n" in Haskell is boxed; in C it's un-boxed. Ditto for putStr vs. printf. The compiled code for the Haskell main appears to have a lot of code to deal with those complications; multiply that by however many functions are called by putStr.
Abe
Jon Cast