[ANNOUNCE] GHC 9.8.1-alpha4 is now available

[Ben Gamari]

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

            https://downloads.haskell.org/ghc/9.8.1-alpha4

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

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

 * 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 roughly 40 new commits relative to alpha 3,
including what we believe should be nearly the last changes to GHC's
boot libraries.

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

[TypeAbstractions]: 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-alpha4/docs/users_guide/9.8.1-notes.html
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