This is taken to mean: “Please compile quickly; I'm not over-bothered about compiled-code quality.” So, for example: ghc -c Foo.hs

Means “turn off all optimisation”, reverting to the same settings as if no -O options had been specified. Saying -O0 can be useful if eg. make has inserted a -O on the command line already.

Means: “Generate good-quality code without taking too long about it.” Thus, for example: ghc -c -O Main.lhs

Means: “Apply every non-dangerous optimisation, even if it means significantly longer compile times.”

The avoided “dangerous” optimisations are those that can make runtime or space worse if you're unlucky. They are normally turned on or off individually.

At the moment, -O2 is unlikely to produce better code than -O.

(NOTE: not supported since GHC 4.x. Please ask if you're interested in this.)

For those who need absolute control over exactly what options are used (e.g., compiler writers, sometimes :-), a list of options can be put in a file and then slurped in with -Ofile.

In that file, comments are of the #-to-end-of-line variety; blank lines and most whitespace is ignored.

Please ask if you are baffled and would like an example of -Ofile!

When this option is given, intermediate floating point values can have a greater precision/range than the final type. Generally this is a good thing, but some programs may rely on the exact precision/range of Float/Double values and should not use this option for their compilation.

Causes GHC to ignore uses of the function Exception.assert in source code (in other words, rewriting Exception.assert p e to e (see Section 8.12, “Assertions ”). This flag is turned on by -O.

Turns off the common-sub-expression elimination optimisation. Can be useful if you have some unsafePerformIO expressions that you don't want commoned-up.

Turns off the strictness analyser; sometimes it eats too many cycles.

Turns off the full laziness optimisation (also known as let-floating). Full laziness increases sharing, which can lead to increased memory residency.

NOTE: GHC doesn't implement complete full-laziness. When optimisation in on, and -fno-full-laziness is not given, some transformations that increase sharing are performed, such as extracting repeated computations from a loop. These are the same transformations that a fully lazy implementation would do, the difference is that GHC doesn't consistently apply full-laziness, so don't rely on it.

Turn on call-pattern specialisation.

Turn on the liberate-case transformation.

Turn on the static argument transformation.

Turn off the "state hack" whereby any lambda with a State# token as argument is considered to be single-entry, hence it is considered OK to inline things inside it. This can improve performance of IO and ST monad code, but it runs the risk of reducing sharing.

Tells GHC to omit all inessential information from the interface file generated for the module being compiled (say M). This means that a module importing M will see only the types of the functions that M exports, but not their unfoldings, strictness info, etc. Hence, for example, no function exported by M will be inlined into an importing module. The benefit is that modules that import M will need to be recompiled less often (only when M's exports change their type, not when they change their implementation).

Tells GHC to ignore all inessential information when reading interface files. That is, even if M.hi contains unfolding or strictness information for a function, GHC will ignore that information.

This option causes all constructor fields which are marked strict (i.e. “!”) to be unboxed or unpacked if possible. It is equivalent to adding an UNPACK pragma to every strict constructor field (see Section 8.13.10, “UNPACK pragma”).

This option is a bit of a sledgehammer: it might sometimes make things worse. Selectively unboxing fields by using UNPACK pragmas might be better.

(Default: 45) Governs the maximum size that GHC will allow a function unfolding to be. (An unfolding has a “size” that reflects the cost in terms of “code bloat” of expanding that unfolding at at a call site. A bigger function would be assigned a bigger cost.)

Consequences: (a) nothing larger than this will be inlined (unless it has an INLINE pragma); (b) nothing larger than this will be spewed into an interface file.

Increasing this figure is more likely to result in longer compile times than faster code. The next option is more useful:

(Default: 8) This is the magic cut-off figure for unfolding: below this size, a function definition will be unfolded at the call-site, any bigger and it won't. The size computed for a function depends on two things: the actual size of the expression minus any discounts that apply (see -funfolding-con-discount).