[ANNOUNCE] GHC 8.0.1 release candidate 2

[George Colpitts]

Good news! I assume there will be a Mac OS binary distribution soon?

On Sun, Feb 7, 2016 at 2:13 PM, Ben Gamari <ben at well-typed.com> wrote:

>
> Hello everyone,
>
> The GHC Team is very pleased to announce the second release candidate of
> the Glasgow Haskell Compiler 8.0.1 release. Source and binary
> distributions as well as the newly revised users guide and Haddock
> documentation can be found at
>
>     http://downloads.haskell.org/~ghc/8.0.1-rc2/
>
> This is the second in a series of release candidates leading up to the
> 8.0.1
> release and fixes many of the issues reported in -rc1. These fixes
> include,
>
>   * A re-rewrite of the pattern checker by George Karachalias. The new
>     checker should have far more predictable performance characteristics
>     while sacrificing minimal reasoning power. This should resolve a
>     large number of the issues felt in -rc1.
>
>   * Richard Eisenberg has been hammering out all manner of
>     type-application- and TypeInType-related issues (#11335, #11416,
>     #11405). There is still more work to do here, however (e.g. #11471).
>
>   * Matthew Pickering has restored support for multi-clause pattern
>     synonyms (#11367)
>
>   * A latent bug in the constraint solver which popped up as a build
>     failure in xmonad-contrib in -rc1 has been fixed (#11379)
>
>   * Dimitrios Vytiniotis and Simon Peyton Jones has been squashing a
>     variety of older type-checker bugs at a furious rate (#11458,
>     #11248, #11330, #11408)
>
>   * Simon Peyton Jones has taught demand analysis to more precisely
>     handle exceptions (#11222)
>
>   * Tamar Christina has added support for remote GHCi on Windows
>     and resolved a long-standing linking issue (#11223)
>
>   * Loading of compiled modules needing shared library symbols now works
>     in GHCi thanks to Peter Trommler (#10458)
>
>   * A variety of limitations in our implementation of Typeable
>     implementation have been fixed (#11120) although there is still more
>     to be done (#11334).
>
>   * A terrible failure of type inference due to visible type application
> has
>     been fixed (#11458)
>
>   * InjectiveTypeFamilies has been renamed to TypeFamilyDependencies
>
>   * Custom type errors are now more robust (#11391) although there is
>     still more work to be done (#11541)
>
>   * We now have a more conservative default warning set, as well as
>     better mechanisms for managing warning changes in the future.
>     (#11429, #11370)
>
>   * Compatibility with earlier Cabal versions should be a bit more
>     robust.
>
>   * The user-facing interface of the (formerly "implicit") CallStack
>     functionality has been reworked, hiding the implicit callstack
>     parameter behind a constraint synonym.
>
>   * Online haddock documentation has been restored (#11419)
>
>   * We now offer xz archives exclusively
>
>   * A variety of miscellaneous bug-fixes have also been merged.
>
> All of these changes add up to nearly 200 commits in total. Given the
> large amount of churn between this candidate and -rc1, as well as the
> fact that there is at least one more significant patch pending (D1891,
> to fix #11471 and others), we will be releasing a third release
> candidate in a few weeks which should address more of the issues listed
> on the release status page [1]. Assuming things go well, we should be
> able to cut a final release by early March at the latest.
>
> All of the builds above were produced from the ghc-8.0.1-rc2 tag (commit
> e2230228906a1c0fa1f86a0c1aa18d87de3cc49d) *with the exception of the
> Windows builds*. Unfortunately, it was realized only too late that the
> tagged commit is broken on Windows. Consequently, the Windows builds
> were produced from the ghc-8.0.1-rc2 tag with two additional patches
> (commit 5b35c5509adb1311856faa0bc9767aec9ad5e9b7). While this would of
> course be completely unacceptable for a proper release, time constraints
> have meant that this was unfortunately the only viable option for this
> release candidate. We apologize for any confusion this may cause.
>
> At this point we are working very hard to nail the remaining bugs
> labelled as "highest" priority on the 8.0.1 status page [1]. If you have
> an issue which you'd like to see addressed in the release that does not
> appear in this list, please bring it to our attention.
>
> As always, we look forward to hearing about any issues that you
> encounter with this candidate. Thanks to everyone who has contributed so
> far!
>
> Cheers,
>
>  - Ben
>
>
> [1] https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Status/GHC-8.0.1
>
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