[ANNOUNCE] GHC 8.8.1-alpha1 is now available

[Ben Gamari]

Hello everyone,

The GHC team is pleased to announce the first alpha release of GHC 8.8.1.
The source distribution, binary distributions, and documentation are
available at

    https://downloads.haskell.org/~ghc/8.8.1-alpha1

A draft of the release notes is also available [1].

This release is the culmination of over 3000 commits by over one hundred
contributors and has several new features and numerous bug fixes
relative to GHC 8.6:

 * Profiling now works correctly on 64-bit Windows (although still may
   be problematic on 32-bit Windows due to platform limitations; see
   #15934)

 * A new code layout algorithm for amd64's native code generator

 * The introduction of a late lambda-lifting pass which may reduce
   allocations significantly for some programs.

 * Further work on Trees That Grow, enabling improved code re-use of the
   Haskell AST in tooling

 * More locations where users can write `forall` (GHC Proposal #0007)

 * Further work on the Hadrian build system

This release starts the pre-release cycle for GHC 8.8. This cycle is
starting quite a bit later than expected due recent work on GHC's CI and
release infrastructure. See the GHC Blog [2] for more on this.

As always, if anything looks amiss do let us know.

Happy compiling!

Cheers,

- Ben


[1] https://downloads.haskell.org/ghc/8.8.1-alpha1/docs/html/users_guide/8.8.1-notes.html
[2] https://www.haskell.org/ghc/blog/20190405-ghc-8.8-status.html
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