On Mon, Nov 2, 2015 at 3:11 PM, Ludovic Courtès <l...@gnu.org> wrote: > Federico Beffa <be...@ieee.org> skribis: > >> l...@gnu.org (Ludovic Courtès) writes: > > [...] > >>> What about removing all the .a? Would that be OK? >>> >>> On that topic I found >>> <https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/DynamicByDefault> but it’s not >>> clear to me whether this is relevant here. At worst we can add a phase >>> that removes these files. >> >> I do not know much about this topic, but I think that the discussion at >> the link you provided is relevant, as probably is the one at >> >> https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/DynamicLinkingDebate >> >> My interpretation of the above discussions is that it is in principle OK >> to remove statically linked libraries, but: (i) you loose the >> possibility to create statically linked executables (the default; the >> discussion here is about Haskell libraries, not system libraries), (ii) >> dynamically linked executables are slower than statically linked ones >> and (iii) it may create some build systems compatibility problems. > > (i) and (ii) apply to all the packages in Guix, not just Haskell > packages: most of the time we provide only shared libraries, and PIC > code includes a slight “performance penalty” (and possibly large memory > savings if several processes use the library.) > > I’m not sure what (iii) means though?
I'm not sure either :-) It's one of the reasons listed in the discussion at the above link. I'm just passing on the information. > >> Personally I would keep them as the above discussions give me the >> impression that dynamic linking is not very mature in GHC. In any case, >> if people feel strongly about removing static libraries, then I would at >> least add an option to the build-system to easily re-enable their >> creation. > > I think we could even simply move them to a different output, for those > who really need them. That would be ideal, but I'm not sure you can simply move them. The location of a library must be listed in the binary library cache. I do not know if you can have more entries for a single library. I guess that would have to be investigated experimentally. Regards, Fede
