[ANNOUNCE] GHC 8.6.1 released

[Ben Gamari]

Hello everyone,

The GHC team is pleased to announce the availability of GHC 8.6.1, the
fourth major release in the GHC 8 series. The source distribution, binary
distributions, and documentation for this release are available at

    https://downloads.haskell.org/~ghc/8.6.1

The 8.6 release fixes over 400 bugs from the 8.4 series and introduces a
number of exciting features. These most notably include:

 * A new deriving mechanism, `deriving via`, providing a convenient way
   for users to extend Haskell's typeclass deriving mechanism

 * Quantified constraints, allowing forall quantification in constraint contexts

 * An early version of the GHCi `:doc` command

 * The `ghc-heap-view` package, allowing introspection into the
   structure of GHC's heap

 * Valid hole fit hints, helping the user to find terms to fill typed
   holes in their programs

 * The BlockArguments extension, allowing the `$` operator to be omitted
   in some unambiguous contexts

 * An exciting new plugin mechanism, source plugins, allowing plugins to
   inspect and modify a wide variety of compiler representations.

 * Improved recompilation checking when plugins are used

 * Significantly better handling of macOS linker command size limits,
   avoiding linker errors while linking large projects

 * The next phase of the MonadFail proposal, enabling
   -XMonadFailDesugaring by default

A full list of the changes in this release can be found in the
release notes:

    https://downloads.haskell.org/~ghc/8.6.1/docs/html/users_guide/8.6.1-notes.html

Perhaps of equal importance, GHC 8.6 is the second major release made
under GHC's accelerated six-month release schedule and the first set of
binary distributions built primarily using our new continuous
integration scheme. While the final 8.6 release is around three weeks
later than initially scheduled due to late-breaking bug reports, we
expect that the 8.8 release schedule shouldn't be affected.

Thanks to everyone who has contributed to developing, documenting, and
testing this release!

As always, let us know if you encounter trouble.


How to get it
~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The easy way is to go to the web page, which should be self-explanatory:

        https://www.haskell.org/ghc/

We supply binary builds in the native package format for many
platforms, and the source distribution is available from the same
place.

Packages will appear as they are built - if the package for your
system isn't available yet, please try again later.


Background
~~~~~~~~~~

Haskell is a standard lazy functional programming language.

GHC is a state-of-the-art programming suite for Haskell.  Included is
an optimising compiler generating efficient code for a variety of
platforms, together with an interactive system for convenient, quick
development.  The distribution includes space and time profiling
facilities, a large collection of libraries, and support for various
language extensions, including concurrency, exceptions, and foreign
language interfaces. GHC is distributed under a BSD-style open source license.

A wide variety of Haskell related resources (tutorials, libraries,
specifications, documentation, compilers, interpreters, references,
contact information, links to research groups) are available from the
Haskell home page (see below).


On-line GHC-related resources
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Relevant URLs on the World-Wide Web:

GHC home page              https://www.haskell.org/ghc/
GHC developers' home page  https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/
Haskell home page          https://www.haskell.org/


Supported Platforms
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The list of platforms we support, and the people responsible for them,
is here:

   https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Contributors

Ports to other platforms are possible with varying degrees of
difficulty.  The Building Guide describes how to go about porting to a
new platform:

    https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Building


Developers
~~~~~~~~~~

We welcome new contributors.  Instructions on accessing our source
code repository, and getting started with hacking on GHC, are
available from the GHC's developer's site run by Trac:

  https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/


Mailing lists
~~~~~~~~~~~~~

We run mailing lists for GHC users and bug reports; to subscribe, use
the web interfaces at

    https://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/glasgow-haskell-users
    https://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ghc-tickets

There are several other haskell and ghc-related mailing lists on
www.haskell.org; for the full list, see

    https://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo

Some GHC developers hang out on #haskell on IRC, too:

    https://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/IRC_channel

Please report bugs using our bug tracking system.  Instructions on
reporting bugs can be found here:

    https://www.haskell.org/ghc/reportabug
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