linker - Making small haskell executables?

Question

Are there any good ways to make small haskell executables? With ghc6 a simple hello world program seems to come to about 370kB (523kB before strip). Hello world in C is about 4kB (9kB before strip).

Answer 1

With the development branch of GHC (anyone know exactly which version this was added in?):

$ ghc -o hello hello.hs
$ strip -p --strip-unneeded --remove-section=.comment -o hello-small hello
$ du hello hello-small
700 hello
476 hello-small

Add the -dynamic flag for a dynamically linked RTS:

$ ghc -dynamic -o hello hello.hs
$ strip -p --strip-unneeded --remove-section=.comment -o hello-small hello
$ du hello hello-small
24  hello
16  hello-small

See also: http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/SharedLibraries/PlatformSupport

For comparison with C:

$ gcc hello.c -o hello
$ strip -p --strip-unneeded --remove-section=.comment -o hello-small hello
$ du hello hello-small
12  hello
8   hello-small