GHC 9.6.7 is now available

[Luite Stegeman]

The GHC developers are very pleased to announce the availability of
GHC 9.6.7. Binary distributions, source distributions, and
documentation are available at

            https://downloads.haskell.org/ghc/9.6.7

We hope to have this release available via ghcup shortly.

GHC 9.6.7 brings number of fixes, including:

- GHC’s internal Unique type has been widened to 64-bits on 32-bit
architectures, avoiding potential miscompilations on large projects.
- Fix a runtime crash when using the compacting GC, caused by black
holes in large objects.
- Added new flags -fspec-eval and -fspec-eval-dictfun to allow
switching off speculative evaluation.

The following libraries have been updated since GHC 9.6.6:

- base-4.18.3.0
- filepath-1.4.301.0
- unix-2.8.6.0
- bytestring-0.11.5.4
- array-0.5.8.0

A more detailed description can be found in the [release notes] and a
full list of changes in [GHC!13841] and [GHC!13891]

Note about Haskell Language Server and building GHC 9.8+:

The change of Unique to 64 bit [GHC#22010] adds the exported symbol
ghc_unique_counter64 to the RTS. Unfortunately it's impossible to
avoid this without breaking other things. If you encounter a linker
error related to ghc_unique_counter64 when building GHC (or building a
GHC-derived package like ghc-lib-parser) with GHC 9.6.7, you probably
have to add this [fix] to the program you're building.

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.

Please give this release a try and open a [ticket] if you see anything amiss.

~ Luite

[release notes]:
https://downloads.haskell.org/ghc/9.6.7/docs/users_guide/9.6.7-notes.html
[GHC!13841]: https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/-/merge_requests/13841
[GHC!13891]: https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/-/merge_requests/13891
[GHC#22010]: https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/-/issues/22010
[fix] https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/-/merge_requests/13743
[ticket] https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/-/issues/new