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Small Haskell program compiled with GHC into huge binary

Recently I noticed how large Haskell executables are. Everything below was compiled on GHC 7.4.1 with -O2 on Linux.

  1. Hello World (main = putStrLn "Hello World!") is over 800 KiB. Running strip over it reduces the filesize to 500 KiB; even adding -dynamic to the compilation doesn't help much, leaving me with a stripped executable around 400 KiB.

  2. Compiling a very primitive example involving Parsec yields a 1.7 MiB file.

    -- File: test.hs
import qualified Text.ParserCombinators.Parsec as P
import Data.Either (either)

-- Parses a string of type "x y" to the tuple (x,y).
testParser :: P.Parser (Char, Char)
testParser = do
    a <- P.anyChar
    P.char ' '
    b <- P.anyChar
    return (a, b)

-- Parse, print result.
str = "1 2"
main = print $ either (error . show) id . P.parse    testParser "" $ str
-- Output: ('1','2')

    Parsec may be a larger library, but I'm only using a tiny subset of it, and indeed the optimized core code generated by the above is dramatically smaller than the executable:

    $ ghc -O2 -ddump-simpl -fforce-recomp test.hs | wc -c
49190 (bytes)

    Therefore, it's not the case that a huge amount of Parsec is actually found in the program, which was my initial assumption.

Why are the executables of such an enormous size? Is there something I can do about it (except dynamic linking)?

haskell compilation ghc
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