Re: [Haskell-cafe] Cyclic Inclusions

On 13 Aug 2008, at 11:10, Henning Thielemann wrote:

On Wed, 13 Aug 2008, Thomas Davie wrote:

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On 13 Aug 2008, at 05:06, ajb@spamcop.net wrote:

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Why is separate compilation important? I'm a little shocked that anyone on this list should have to ask

Quoting Thomas Davie : this question. Two people have asked it now.

Really? So you're using YHC then? It after all compiles *much* faster than GHC, but produces slower binaries. To be honest, ghc compiles things so fast (at least on any of my systems) that I couldn't care less if it took 10 times as long (I would however like some added convenience for that time spent)

It's the ubiquitous "computers are fast enough today" argument. I don't buy it. We don't have compile time to waste. There will always be computers that are much slower and have less memory than the current customer desktop computers, there are always tasks that a computer can do instead of doing slowed down compilation. I'm glad that we have overcome C's way of concatening all header files together before starting compilation.

If you don't want to be slowed down by the compiler, why aren't you writing machine code directly? The point is that time saved with convenience (often) comes at the cost of time spent while compiling. Adding an option to ghc to allow you to not waste time writing hi-boot files allows me to make an informed decision about whether it will take me longer to (a) figure out *how* to write an hi-boot file (b) actually do the writing, or if it'll take less time/effort to just let the compiler do it for me. Bob