Re: [wxhaskell-devel] postponing wxWidgets 2.8 support and releasing earlier?

[Eric Y. K. <eri...@gm...>]

On Thu, Feb 28, 2008 at 15:49:45 +0900, shelarcy wrote:
> We must tell the linker to link splited objects.
> -split-objs option generates it in (OutputDir)/(ModuleName)_split directory per moudles.
> You can see that your own directory or below cabal code.
> 
> http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/latest/html/libraries/Cabal/src/Distribution-Simple-GHC.html#getHaskellObjects
> 
> (OutputDir)/(ModuleName)_split directory has ld.script that describe just INPUT(...).
> So, I think we must pass that per modules.

I've had a look at this, and I confess that I'm pretty lost.

I see that passing -split-objs to GHC causes it to create many tiny .o
files per module (one per top-level function, says the manual), in
addition to the one .o file for that module.

The problem is that I don't really know what we do with them.  The one
difference I noticed (and that I pounced on) is that it is these files
that get put into the libfoo.a archive files.  I'm guessing that this is
enough because when you pass in a whole bunch of object files as
arguments to a linker, the linker is smart enough to ignore any files
that are not used at all?

Also, I'm guessing that the ld.script stuff is GNU-specific (we don't
get them on MacOS X), and that it isn't even neccessary for GNU (it's
just an alternative to having a very long list of command line
arguments). 

Anyway, my latest patch shows how I currently understand things.  I
hope it's progress!

> If we want to do it, to use -split-objs for spliting the single object file,
> to use -f* options (I don't know this is good for wxHaskell or not), or to
> use strip for Haskell program.

Well, it seems like using strip is pretty simple advice, and quite
helpful in that it shrank the UTF8Sampler from 8M to 4M.  But I suppose
-split-objs would really make the biggest difference?

-- 
Eric Kow <http://www.nltg.brighton.ac.uk/home/Eric.Kow>
PGP Key ID: 08AC04F9