Place shared objects in LIBDIR
If one compiles a program with -dynamic, the resulting executable includes in its rpath the library directory of every Haskell package that the program links against. This causes a significant number of excess system calls at program start-up. For instance, in the case of a dynamically linked ghc executable on Debian 8, compiling a trivial "hello world" application produces over 800 open calls, the majority of which originate from the dynamic linker. e.g.,
$ strace -f -e open ghc-7.10.3 -c -fforce-recomp Test.hs 2>&1 | grep open
...
open("/usr/lib/ghc/bin/../haske_GGvi737nHHfG6zm2y7Rimi/tls/x86_64/libtinfo.so.5", O_RDONLY|O_CLOEXEC) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
open("/usr/lib/ghc/bin/../haske_GGvi737nHHfG6zm2y7Rimi/tls/libtinfo.so.5", O_RDONLY|O_CLOEXEC) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
open("/usr/lib/ghc/bin/../haske_GGvi737nHHfG6zm2y7Rimi/x86_64/libtinfo.so.5", O_RDONLY|O_CLOEXEC) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
open("/usr/lib/ghc/bin/../haske_GGvi737nHHfG6zm2y7Rimi/libtinfo.so.5", O_RDONLY|O_CLOEXEC) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
open("/usr/lib/ghc/bin/../termi_6iVf4EBnOgfIaaOCLRs8jl/tls/x86_64/libtinfo.so.5", O_RDONLY|O_CLOEXEC) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
open("/usr/lib/ghc/bin/../termi_6iVf4EBnOgfIaaOCLRs8jl/tls/libtinfo.so.5", O_RDONLY|O_CLOEXEC) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
open("/usr/lib/ghc/bin/../termi_6iVf4EBnOgfIaaOCLRs8jl/x86_64/libtinfo.so.5", O_RDONLY|O_CLOEXEC) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
open("/usr/lib/ghc/bin/../termi_6iVf4EBnOgfIaaOCLRs8jl/libtinfo.so.5", O_RDONLY|O_CLOEXEC) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
open("/usr/lib/ghc/bin/../ghc_0AG9TOjDEtx4Ji3wSwHOBe/tls/x86_64/libtinfo.so.5", O_RDONLY|O_CLOEXEC) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
open("/usr/lib/ghc/bin/../ghc_0AG9TOjDEtx4Ji3wSwHOBe/tls/libtinfo.so.5", O_RDONLY|O_CLOEXEC) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
open("/usr/lib/ghc/bin/../ghc_0AG9TOjDEtx4Ji3wSwHOBe/x86_64/libtinfo.so.5", O_RDONLY|O_CLOEXEC) = -1 ENOENT (No such file or directory)
...The dynamic linker must look in nearly 25 Haskell library directories to locate every system library! This is madness.
Instead of placing each shared library in its own directory, $LIBDIR/$PKG_KEY/lib$PKG_KEY.so as we do currently, why not just place them in $LIBDIR, e.g. $LIBDIR/lib$PKG_KEY.so. This would mean that we need to include only one directory, $LIBDIR, in rpath.