Making a small GHC installation

[Simon Marlow]

On 11/10/2011 19:02, Iavor Diatchki wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Does anyone have any advice about how I might make a smallish GHC installation?
>
> The context is that I need to make a demo VM, which has a limited
> amount of space, and I'd like to have GHC installed on the system but
> the default GHC installation (~700MB) does not fit.  The installation
> does not need to be complete---I don't need documentation, or
> profiling, or Template Haskell---and I only need to install a fairly
> limited set of libraries, just enough to build my project.  I'd be
> happy to build a custom version of GHC, if that's the easiest way to
> achieve the goal.
>
> So, if you have experience doing something similar, or you know of
> what might be the best way to approach the problem, advice would be
> most welcome!

You can get rid of:

  - profiling (*_p.a, *.p_hi)
  - dynamic (*_dyn.a, *.dyn_hi)
  - the GHC package (rm -rf lib/ghc-7.2.1), assuming you don't need it
  - any other libraries you don't need
  - Haddock (it's as big as GHC)
  - all the documentation
  - possibly: all the GHCi libraries (HS*.o).  I think GHCi will use
    the .a libraries if it can't find the .o versions, but you might
    need 7.2.1 for this to work, I don't remember

Cheers,
	Simon