[pmoriarty]

I used to use this a lot, back in the bad old days, when drive space was at a premium.

These days I struggle to fill my hard drives no matter how wasteful I am with downloading videos and not bothering to clean up afterwards... and the amount of hard drive space you can buy per dollar keeps growing faster than I can fill my disks.

Much trickier issues to tackle are speed (unless you go with SSD's, but then you run in to space issues again, and reliability issues), backups, and data integrity. All of these issues are made much harder by the sheer amounts of data we're storing these days. Executables usually account for only a relatively small fraction of that space.

[kronos29296]

I think upx is more useful for static binaries like that of Haskell applications which is kinda huge. (GHC produces huge binaries - eg. pandoc or ghc-mod). A 100 something mb binary is not what you usually have. UPX can work its magic stuff like that. More manageable not necessarily essential but when you need it you need it badly.

[DaiPlusPlus]

Is there a reason the Haskell compiler can't trim-out code it knows won't be used? Or is there another reason for the large size?

[tome]

The word on the street is that it's not unused code but rather aggressively inlined code.

[kccqzy]

That’s called split sections and it’s enabled by default in GHC 8.2.1. The main reason is aggressively inlined code compiled slightly differently.