large binaries

[Jon Cast]

Abraham Egnor <aegnor@antioch-college.edu> wrote:
> This is something I just noticed...

> hello.hs:
> module Main(main) where

> main = putStr "Hello world!\n"

> hello.c:
> #include <stdio.h>

> int main(void)
> {
>   printf("Hello world!\n");
>   return 0;
> }

> [abe@shiva:~/src/test] $ ghc hello.hs -o hello_hs
> [abe@shiva:~/src/test] $ gcc hello.c -o hello_c
> [abe@shiva:~/src/test] $ ls -l hello_*
> -rwxr-xr-x    1 abe      engy        13712 Jul 18 11:34 hello_c
> -rwxr-xr-x    1 abe      engy       299900 Jul 18 11:33 hello_hs
>
> Why is the binary made by ghc 20 times bigger than the one made by gcc?

I don't know for certain, but I've got a couple of guesses:

1. hello_hs is probably statically linked.  hello_c is probably
   dynamically linked.

2. "Hello world!\n" in Haskell is boxed; in C it's un-boxed.  Ditto
for putStr vs. printf.  The compiled code for the Haskell main appears
to have a lot of code to deal with those complications; multiply that
by however many functions are called by putStr.

> Abe

Jon Cast