[ANNOUNCE] Glasgow Haskell Compiler 8.0.1, release candidate 1

[Ben Gamari]

The GHC Team is very pleased to announce the first release candidate of
the Glasgow Haskell Compiler 8.0.1 release. Source and binary
distributions as well as the newly revised users guide can be found at

    http://downloads.haskell.org/~ghc/8.0.1-rc1/

This is the first in a series of release candidates which will allow us
to get wider testing of the significant changes that have occurred since
the 7.10 series. These include,

 * the TypeInType extension, which unifies types and kinds allowing for
   promotion of more Haskell constructs to the type-level

 * the introduction of type application in source programs

 * support for recursive superclass relationships

 * support for Applicative do notation

 * introduction of the DuplicateRecordFields language extension

 * a rewritten and substantially more thorough pattern match checker

 * the introduction of injective type classes

 * introduction of the Strict and StrictData language extensions,
   allowing modules to be compiled with strict-by-default evaluation
   of bindings

 * the ability to run the GHCi interpreter in a separate process,
   allowing a callstacks in GHCi, easier integration with tooling, and
   more

and much more.

Changes of this magnitude will invariably bring bugs. This release
candidate in particular is known to suffer from a few significant issues
which are being actively worked upon,

 * The new -XInjectiveTypeFamilies language extension will likely be
   renamed to -XTypeFamilyDependencies

 * #11120: Type representations are missing for some types and promoted
   constructors

 * #11334: Solving for Typeable (Proxy :: Proxy 'Compose) fails

 * #11276: Pattern checker performance can degrade significantly in
   presence of pattern matches with guards

 * #11405: Type-level skolem-escape check fails incorrectly

 * #11414: Use of -XStrict results in compiler abort

 * #11379: Instance solver fails to terminate

 * #11419: Haddock documentation is currently not included in the binary
   distributions (and hence is missing on downloads.haskell.org)

 * #11370: -Wredundant-constraints being included in -Wall breaks
   the three-release compatibility policy

In the coming weeks we will continue to iterate on these issues. We will
also look at Trac tickets marked with "highest" priority on the release
status page [2]. 

If you have a ticket that you would like to see addressed that does not
meet one of these criteria, please bring this to our attention.
Likewise, if you encounter an issue please open a ticket if one does not
already exist.

Also note that we currently cannot offer 32-bit Windows builds due to
breaking changing in a recent Windows 10 upgrade. We'll work to
resolve this before the 8.0 release but please let us know if this poses
a significant problem for you.

Cheers,

- Ben


[1] https://cygwin.com/ml/cygwin/2015-12/msg00003.htm
[2] https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Status/GHC-8.0.1
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