Very smaller Haskell DLLs
I’ve found a way to reduce the size of one of my Haskell DLLs from 12.8 MB to 1 MB. There are two steps: passing the option -s to the linker and using UPX to compress the DLL. In a previous post, I said that my Haskell DLLs do not work after compressing them with UPX. But thanks to this -s option, they work.
Well, more exactly, I should say that my DLL works… Unfortunately, I have tried this method on a minimal example and the DLL does not work anymore after the UPX compression. That’s strange.
Let me share now. If you pass the verbose option -v to ghc -shared, you can see that there are two linker phases. The first one generates the o file. The second one generates the DLL. When I pass the option -s to this second phase, the size of my DLL is 4.7 MB, while it is 12.8 MB without the -s option.
You can pass the -s option to the linker like this:
But if I do like this, the compilation does not work. This command passes the -s option to the two linker phases. In order to pass this option to the second phase only, I proceed in two steps. I firstly run this command:
This generates the file myhaskellscript.o. Then I run this command:
In this way, since myhaskellscript.o already exists, the first linker phase is skipped, and thus the -s option is passed to the second phase only.
Then I can compress the DLL with the UPX program. As I previously said, the -s linking option has a role here: without this option, I can compress the DLL with UPX but the DLL does not work.