[Haskell-cafe] GHCi panic

Andrew Coppin andrewcoppin at btinternet.com
Fri May 30 16:59:45 EDT 2008


I don't suppose this will surprise anybody greatly, but...

Apparently if you write a Haskell module that is 400 KB in size and 
defines a single CAF consisting of a 45,000-element [String], GHCi 
panics when attempting to load it interpretted, and hits a stack 
overflow attempting to load it compiled.

GHC also takes forever to compile it in the first place, and eventually 
spits out a 5 MB interface file later followed by a 16 MB object file. 
And attempting to compile a trivial module against it again causes a 
stack overflow.

Presumably the designers of GHC just didn't expect anybody to try to do 
anything this weird? ;-)

I was hoping that doing things this way round would be *more efficient*. 
But this is apparently not the case at all, so I'll just go back to 
reading the file at runtime instead...

[Presumably if I was desparate I could convert the data into some kind 
of preinitialised C structure and manually link it in - if I was that 
determined.]



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