Hi Simon,
Am Montag, den 08.03.2010, 11:07 +0000 schrieb Simon Marlow:
On Sat, Mar 6, 2010 at 11:57 AM, Joachim Breitner<nomeata@debian.org> wrote:
Hi,
in Debian, we are having some problems building large libraries (such as
agda, highlighting-kate, xmonad-contrib) on weaker architectures (sparc,
armel, s390) which compile with -fvia-C, especially when building the
profiling libraries.
In the case of highlighting-kate, there were really issues with the
code: A huge list of words which ghc seemed to try to inline caused it
consuming a lot of memory.
But in the case of agda, it even fails with relatively small modules:
https://buildd.debian.org/fetch.cgi?pkg=agda&arch=sparc&ver=2.2.6-3&stamp=1267334936&file=log&as=raw
Now, looking at the memory gauge on my computer while compiling such a
program with Cabal (which compiles all modules in one ghc call), it
looks like it is steadily increasing. I’d expect ghc to free a lot of
memory when it is done with a module, but this does not seem to be the
case.
Is this a bug (i.e. memory leak) in ghc or expected behavior?
Can you verify that it is GHC leaking memory, and not gcc? I recommend
turning off -fvia-C in particular unless you're sure that you need it.
Sorry if I was not clear: The issues arise on “strange” architectures
(armel, s390, sparc, mips) where, as far as I know, -fvia-C is the only
option and thus the default. I was not setting this flag myself.