At 1:52 PM +0100 9/6/04, Simon Marlow wrote:
On 06 September 2004 13:43, Simon Peyton-Jones wrote:
* The link step needs -package flags, because it only gets .o files,
and we didn't want it to start hunting through .hi files (though that
would be possible)
Just to expand on this a little: it's not clear that we could do this
even if we wanted to. Given an arbitrary .o file, we can't tell (a) if
it is a compiled Haskell module and (b) if so, where its .hi file can be
found. We can make guesses, but there isn't a general solution.
Guessing is a bit distasteful because guaranteed there would be people
who would be confused when the guesses turned out to be wrong for their
specific situation.
Couldn't the .hi file contents be put in the .o file itself, in a
separate section not loaded into memory? The presence of such a
section would indicate that the .o file was compiled Haskell (or,
perhaps, compiled GHC). Tool and platform restrictions admittedly
might make this difficult or impractical.
Dean
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