Status updates

[Austin Seipp]

Hello all,

It has been another slow week here, and there wasn't a lot I touched
in the tree this week. The primary highlights:

 * The AMP battle rages on! It turns out the addition of `join` to
`Monad` has had some subtle implications for GND/Roles. See here for
more: https://www.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2014-May/004964.html

 * Simon is still reviewing the ORF work, as far as I know. Hopefully
it will Land Real Soon Now.

 * Patches! Lots of them! I'm reviewing and merging several of them
right now. In particular, all the ones slated for 7.8.3 are up for
grabs[1] by me right now, but I do need to double-check some of them
e.g. on Windows, to make sure nothing breaks.

 * Many branches have been deleted. Something like 20-30 of them, I
think. Yay! Sorry for the spam to the commits list too, but it was a
necessary evil.

 * I'm working away at some of the bugs. #7602 is building right now,
with some nice improvements. That will go into the 7.8.3 branch, so OS
X users will get a big performance gain, yay!

 * Another bug: #8736. I had a patch for this, but this one is tricky
to fix because when we load object files, we don't actually know if
they're static or dynamic. This is encoded in the interface file, but
there are some tricky semantics about what to do in some cases of
(legitimately) needing to re-read interface files that are a bit
subtle. I'll be trying to revive my patch for this today.

Other than that, there really hasn't been a lot to mention. Please, do
get down on reviewing some bugs and helping fix them![1] I'm more than
willing to help in any way I can.

I'd also like some feedback: what do people think about the current
list? Are there any of you readers who see one *you* think is truly
critical? Maybe we can get some input to help narrow the scope if
needed.

Thanks!

[1] https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/query?status=infoneeded&status=merge&status=new&status=patch&group=status&milestone=7.8.3

-- 
Regards,

Austin Seipp, Haskell Consultant
Well-Typed LLP, http://www.well-typed.com/