[ANNOUNCE] GHC 9.8.1-alpha2 is now available

[Ben Gamari]

The GHC developers are very pleased to announce the availability of the
second alpha prerelease of GHC 9.8.1. Binary distributions, source
distributions, and documentation are available at

               https://downloads.haskell.org/ghc/9.8.1-alpha2

GHC 9.8 will bring a number of new features and improvements, including:

 * Preliminary support the `TypeApplications` language extension [type-binders],
   allowing types to be bound in type declarations.

 * Support for the `ExtendedLiterals` extension, providing syntax for
   non-word-sized numeric literals in the surface language
   [extended-literals]

 * Improved rewrite rule matching behavior, allowing limited matching of
   higher-order patterns

 * Better support for user-defined warnings by way of the `WARNING` pragma [warnings]

 * The introduction of the new `GHC.TypeError.Unsatisfiable`
   constraint, allowing more predictable user-defined type errors [unsatisfiable]

 * Implementation of the export deprecation proposal, allowing module
   exports to be marked with `DEPRECATE` pragmas [deprecated-exports]

 * The addition of build semaphore support for parallel compilation;
   with coming support in `cabal-install` this will allow better use of
   parallelism in multi-package builds [jsem]

 * More efficient representation of info table provenance information,
   reducing binary sizes by over 50% in some cases when
   `-finfo-table-map` is in use

A full accounting of changes can be found in the [release notes].
This alpha includes around two dozen bug-fixes relative to alpha 1.

We would like to thank GitHub, IOG, the Zw3rk stake pool,
Well-Typed, Tweag I/O, Serokell, Equinix, SimSpace, the 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 compiling,

~ Ben


[type-binders]: https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals/blob/master/proposals/0425-decl-invis-binders.rst
[extended-literals]: https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals/blob/master/proposals/0451-sized-literals.rst
[unsatisfiable]: https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals/blob/master/proposals/0433-unsatisfiable.rst
[warnings]: https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals/blob/master/proposals/0541-warning-pragmas-with-categories.rst
[deprecated-exports]: https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals/blob/master/proposals/0134-deprecating-exports-proposal.rst
[jsem]: https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals/blob/master/proposals/0540-jsem.rst
[release notes]: https://downloads.haskell.org/ghc/9.8.1-alpha2/docs/users_guide/9.8.1-notes.html
[ticket]: https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/-/issues/new
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