[ANNOUNCE] GHC 9.4.4 is now available

[Ben Gamari]

The GHC developers are happy to announce the availability of GHC 9.4.4. Binary
distributions, source distributions, and documentation are available at
downloads.haskell.org [1].

This release is primarily a bugfix release. Bugs fixed include:

* An issue where the wrong labels were used in the eventlog for events emitted
  when using info table profiling which was broken in 9.4.3 (#22452)

* Fix a long standing bug where invalid eventlogs would be produced with long
  command-lines (#20221)

* Fix a regression in eta-expansion which resulted in serious performance
  regressions in 9.4.3 (#22424)

* Fix the `-fdefer-diagnostics` flag (#22391)

* Fixes to several subtle compiler panics
  (#22491, #22416, #22549, #22475, #22039)

* Add necessary write barriers to `IORef` operations, avoiding potential
  soundness issues on architectures with weakly-ordered memory models
  (#22468)

Note that, as GHC 9.4 is the first release series where the release artifacts
are all generated by our new Hadrian build system, it is possible that there
will be packaging issues. If you enounter trouble while using a binary
distribution, please open a [ticket]. Likewise, if you are a downstream
packager, do consider migrating to [Hadrian] to run your build; the Hadrian
build system can be built using `cabal-install`, `stack`, or the in-tree
[bootstrap script]. See the accompanying [blog post] for details on
migrating packaging to Hadrian.

We would also like to emphasize that GHC 9.4 must be used in conjunction with
Cabal-3.8 or later. This is particularly important for Windows users due to
changes in GHC's Windows toolchain.

We would like to thank Microsoft Azure, GitHub, IOG, the Zw3rk stake pool,
Well-Typed, Tweag I/O, Serokell, Equinix, SimSpace, Haskell Foundation, and
other anonymous contributors whose on-going financial and in-kind support has
facilitated GHC maintenance and release management over the years. Finally,
this release would not have been possible without the hundreds of open-source
contributors whose work comprise this release.

As always, do give this release a try and open a [ticket] if you see
anything amiss.

Happy Haskelling,

- Ben


[1]: https://downloads.haskell.org/ghc/9.4.4
[ticket]: https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/-/issues/new
[bootstrap script]: https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/-/blob/e2520df3fffa0cf22fb19c5fb872832d11c07d35/hadrian/bootstrap/README.md
[Hadrian]: https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/-/blob/e2520df3fffa0cf22fb19c5fb872832d11c07d35/hadrian
[blog post]: https://www.haskell.org/ghc/blog/20220805-make-to-hadrian.html
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