Disable optimization

Duncan Coutts duncan.coutts at worc.ox.ac.uk
Wed Feb 20 17:37:44 EST 2008


On Wed, 2008-02-20 at 17:16 +0100, Henning Thielemann wrote:
> I have upgraded to Cabal 1.2 while still using GHC-6.4.1. In the Haskore 
> project there is the module NewResolutions.lhs which let GHC run into 
> extensive swapping (certainly due to excessive memory consumption) on 
> compilation when compiled with optimization. One can say, it cannot be 
> compiled this way. This is clearly a compiler bug, but upgrading the 
> compiler is not an option here. Thus I used unoptimized compilation so 
> far. Now, Cabal 1.2 seems to have optimization set by default. While it 
> was easy to add optimization by using 'GHC-Options' field it is not 
> obvious how to override Cabal defaults.

cabal configure --disable-optimisation

For the full list see: cabal configure --help

>   I don't think it was a good idea to switch on optimization silently from 
> one Cabal version to another one. It would have been better to let people 
> configure Cabal globally and manually to use optimization.

Yes, I find myself constantly using

$ cabal configure --disable-optimisation

It seems to me the default should be --enable-optimisation for when
we're doing a full install and --disable-optimisation when just building
locally as a developer. Or at least I want a short form so I don't have
to type so much (eg -O0) - though with cabal's new bash command
completion that's not so painful.

Duncan



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