Michael Snoyman authored Sep 02, 2015 and Ben Gamari committed Sep 02, 2015

On Windows, we're constrained to 32k bytes total for command line
arguments.  When building large projects, this limit can be exceeded.
This patch changes GHC to always use response files for linker
arguments, a feature first used by Microsoft compilers and added to GCC
(over a decade ago).

Alternatives here include:

* Only use this method on Windows systems
* Check the length of the command line arguments and use that to decide
  whether to use this method

I did not pursue either of these, as I believe it would make the patch
more likely to break in less tested situations.

Test Plan:
Confirm that linking still works in general. Ideally: compile a very
large project on Windows with this patch. (I am attempting to do that
myself now, but having trouble getting the Windows build tool chain up
and running.)

Reviewers: goldfire, hvr, rwbarton, austin, thomie, bgamari, Phyx

Reviewed By: thomie, bgamari, Phyx

Subscribers: erikd, awson, #ghc_windows_task_force, thomie

Differential Revision: https://phabricator.haskell.org/D1158

GHC Trac Issues: #8596, #10777