Stefan O'Rear wrote:
On Mon, Aug 13, 2007 at 07:35:31PM +0100, Andrew Coppin wrote:
(I once compiled a program that used the GHC API. The final binary was
several times larger than ghc.exe...)
GHC is a particularly bad case because what it does is determined by the
settings of a bunch of switches in the configuration data. Of course,
GHC isn't smart enough to perform inter-module control flow analysis, so
even with -split-objs you'd probably still link most of GHC.
Is it likely that GHC will ever become "smart enough" to do that kind of
analysis? (I imagine this is going to be especially fun with precompiled
libraries...)
This is called the Constructed Product Return (CPR) analysis, and it
applies to all types with one constructor (in archaic jargon, product
types).
Right. So it doesn't have to have strict fields or anything? Just has to
have exactly one constructor?
Yep, CPR is completely independent of strictness, however the returned
product must be *new*, since returning an old object by value risks
losing sharing (and thus creating large memory leaks).
Right, OK.
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