Building with runtime flags using cabal and ghc

haskell build ghc cabal
Viktor Dahl picture Viktor Dahl · Jun 28, 2011 · Viewed 9.1k times · Source

I have a program written in Haskell and intended to be compiled with GHC. The program scales very well on multiple cores, so enabling multithreading is very important. In my .cabal file I've added ghc-options: -O3 -threaded to link with the threaded runtime. The problem is that with this approach the user would need to run the program with foo +RTS -N, which seems a bit cryptic and not very user friendly.

How can I tell cabal/ghc to enable those runtime flags invisibly to the user? I've read about --with-rtsopts, but GHC (7.0.3) just spits out unrecognized flag when I try to use it.

Answer

John L picture John L · Jun 28, 2011

The flag is -with-rtsopts, not --with-rtsopts, so you should add -with-rtsopts=-N to the ghc-options field. GHC Flag Reference.

Note that this will also require you to link with runtime support by adding -rtsopts to the ghc-options.

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