Re: [Haskell-cafe] Embedded scripting Language for haskell app

On 18 August 2010 01:41, Felipe Lessa wrote:

On Tue, Aug 17, 2010 at 7:07 PM, Christopher Done wrote:

...

Sadly this is true. I went ahead and tested this to confirm; compiled mueval (which uses hint), copied the executable to a virtual machine and it required the GHC package repo among other GHC-related libraries.

The size is indeed a problem. But how much? How does this compare to Lua et al?

IIRC, the Haskell Platform installer for Windows has around 70 MiB. So, if you want a simple installer to include in your installer, be prepared to have another 70 MiB.  I said a dozen mebibytes (12 MiB) because I think the bare minimum needs to have at least this size to have something useful for an app, but this isn't backed up by anything.

I mean, not using the Haskell Platform. I think if you're an experienced developer you'd package just the things your project needs, instead of using the whole Haskell Platform. I don't think the Haskell Platform is the bare minimum.

Lua, on the other hand, is embedded in the executable and weights less than 200 KiB, probably much less than a typical Haskell executable.  I don't know about other interpreters.

True, that's pretty small.

$ du -hs /usr/lib/ghc-6.12.3/ [..] So using one of the best generic compression algorithms available, the size of one of the biggest libraries that a program using hint may need comes down to 4.5 MiB.  Probably if someone is careful enough to include only what really is necessary, the program installer will be at most 10 MiB and will need at most 50 MiB on disk.  I think this is doable, but a lot more than Lua; hint can't be used on set-top boxes =).

That's pretty good! Encouraging if I write an end-user desktop application and want to embed Haskell as a scripting language.