Linker limit on OS X Sierra breaks builds for big projects

I'm opening a fresh ticket as @bgamari suggested in #12479 (closed). There are few more related closed tickets as well: #12198 (closed) and #12588 (closed). The issue occurs on projects with a lot of dependencies. There are reports of that happening across various projects:

https://github.com/NixOS/nixpkgs/issues/22810 https://github.com/commercialhaskell/stack/issues/2577

I'm still able to reproduce it with 8.2.1 and git HEAD with a work project:

    ghc: panic! (the 'impossible' happened)
      (GHC version 8.2.1 for x86_64-apple-darwin):
    	Loading temp shared object failed: dlopen(/var/folders/f8/2_rc4tgd1gj9vbgv7q9gbk4c0000gn/T/ghc94377_0/libghc_325.dylib, 5): no suitable image found.  Did find:
    	/var/folders/f8/2_rc4tgd1gj9vbgv7q9gbk4c0000gn/T/ghc94377_0/libghc_325.dylib: malformed mach-o: load commands size (34592) > 32768

    Please report this as a GHC bug:  http://www.haskell.org/ghc/reportabug

I can't share the sources, but this is a command(generated by stack) that results in this error:

/Users/dr/.stack/setup-exe-cache/x86_64-osx/Cabal-simple_mPHDZzAJ_2.0.0.2_ghc-8.2.1 --builddir=.stack-work/dist/x86_64-osx/Cabal-2.0.0.2 build lib:projectname exe:projectname --ghc-options " -ddump-hi -ddump-to-file -fdiagnostics-color=always"

We're having a chat about this issue with @bgamari and I'll post some of his input:

 bgamari: dredozubov, unfortunately this is pretty much a limitation of OS X's linker
 bgamari: there's no great solution other than petitioning Apple to lift their arbitrary size limit
 bgamari: I've been asking people to open tickets with Apple
 bgamari: As they are really the only ones that can really fix this issue
 dredozubov: bgamari, do you know if someone did this already?
 bgamari: dredozubov, No one has said they have
 dredozubov: the other issue with it, I don't how to do a repro case
 dredozubov: I can reproduce it on a project with a closed sources and that's it
 bgamari: essentially you just need to build a project with enough dependencies
 bgamari: the problem is that Apple's linker sets an artificial cap on the number of shared libraries that an object file can load

Trac metadata

Trac field	Value
Version	8.2.1
Type	Bug
TypeOfFailure	OtherFailure
Priority	normal
Resolution	Unresolved
Component	Compiler (Linking)
Test case
Differential revisions
BlockedBy
Related
Blocking
CC
Operating system
Architecture