[ANNOUNCE] GHC 8.6.1 released
Herbert Valerio Riedel
hvriedel at gmail.com
Sat Sep 22 08:30:13 UTC 2018
Hello everyone,
Here's an addendum to the announcment as it ommitted an important detail:
GHC 8.6.1 is only guaranteed to work properly with tooling which uses
lib:Cabal version 2.4.0.1 or later.
As such, GHC 8.6.1 works best with `cabal-install` 2.4.0.0 or later;
please upgrade to `cabal-install` 2.4.0.0 if you haven't already.
Note that cabal-install 2.4 supports all GHC versions back till GHC
7.0.4 and we also strongly recommend to use the latest available stable
release of `cabal` even with older GHC releases as bugfixes and
improvements aren't always backported to older Cabal releases as well as
to be able to benefit from recently added CABAL format features[8] (or
be able to access package releases on Hackage[9] which rely on those
features) which require recent enough versions of Cabal as well.
Note that binaries aren't available on cabal's download page[1] yet.
If you're on Ubuntu or Debian, you can get a compiled cabal-install 2.4
`.deb` package via Apt from
- https://launchpad.net/~hvr/+archive/ubuntu/ghc
or
- http://downloads.haskell.org/debian/
respectively.
Binary versions for macOS and Windows are also expected to become
available via [2] and [3] soon (and also at [1]).
In the meantime, if you already have GHC 7.10 or later (together with a
compatible `cabal` executable) installed, you can easily install cabal
2.4 yourself from Hackage[9] by invoking
cabal install cabal-install-2.4.0.0
and making sure that the resulting `cabal` executable is accessible via
your $PATH; you can check with `cabal --version` which should emit
something along the lines of
$ cabal --version
cabal-install version 2.4.0.0
compiled using version 2.4.0.1 of the Cabal library
Finally, the Haskell Platform[4] release for GHC 8.6.1 should be
available soon as well which provides yet another recommended "standard
way to get GHC and related tools"[5] in a uniform way across multiple
operating systems. See [4] and [5] for more details about the standard
Haskell Platform distribution.
[1]: https://www.haskell.org/cabal/download.html
[2]: https://haskell.futurice.com/
[3]: https://hub.zhox.com/posts/chocolatey-introduction/
[4]: https://www.haskell.org/platform/
[5]: https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-July/009379.html
[6]: https://launchpad.net/~hvr/+archive/ubuntu/ghc
[7]: http://downloads.haskell.org/debian/
[8]: https://cabal.readthedocs.io/en/latest/file-format-changelog.html
[9]: http://hackage.haskell.org/
-- Herbert
On 2018-09-21 at 20:57:02 -0400, Ben Gamari wrote:
> Hello everyone,
>
> The GHC team is pleased to announce the availability of GHC 8.6.1, the
> fourth major release in the GHC 8 series. The source distribution, binary
> distributions, and documentation for this release are available at
>
> https://downloads.haskell.org/~ghc/8.6.1
>
> The 8.6 release fixes over 400 bugs from the 8.4 series and introduces a
> number of exciting features. These most notably include:
>
> * A new deriving mechanism, `deriving via`, providing a convenient way
> for users to extend Haskell's typeclass deriving mechanism
>
> * Quantified constraints, allowing forall quantification in constraint contexts
>
> * An early version of the GHCi `:doc` command
>
> * The `ghc-heap-view` package, allowing introspection into the
> structure of GHC's heap
>
> * Valid hole fit hints, helping the user to find terms to fill typed
> holes in their programs
>
> * The BlockArguments extension, allowing the `$` operator to be omitted
> in some unambiguous contexts
>
> * An exciting new plugin mechanism, source plugins, allowing plugins to
> inspect and modify a wide variety of compiler representations.
>
> * Improved recompilation checking when plugins are used
>
> * Significantly better handling of macOS linker command size limits,
> avoiding linker errors while linking large projects
>
> * The next phase of the MonadFail proposal, enabling
> -XMonadFailDesugaring by default
>
> A full list of the changes in this release can be found in the
> release notes:
>
> https://downloads.haskell.org/~ghc/8.6.1/docs/html/users_guide/8.6.1-notes.html
>
> Perhaps of equal importance, GHC 8.6 is the second major release made
> under GHC's accelerated six-month release schedule and the first set of
> binary distributions built primarily using our new continuous
> integration scheme. While the final 8.6 release is around three weeks
> later than initially scheduled due to late-breaking bug reports, we
> expect that the 8.8 release schedule shouldn't be affected.
>
> Thanks to everyone who has contributed to developing, documenting, and
> testing this release!
>
> As always, let us know if you encounter trouble.
>
>
> How to get it
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~
>
> The easy way is to go to the web page, which should be self-explanatory:
>
> https://www.haskell.org/ghc/
>
> We supply binary builds in the native package format for many
> platforms, and the source distribution is available from the same
> place.
>
> Packages will appear as they are built - if the package for your
> system isn't available yet, please try again later.
>
>
> Background
> ~~~~~~~~~~
>
> Haskell is a standard lazy functional programming language.
>
> GHC is a state-of-the-art programming suite for Haskell. Included is
> an optimising compiler generating efficient code for a variety of
> platforms, together with an interactive system for convenient, quick
> development. The distribution includes space and time profiling
> facilities, a large collection of libraries, and support for various
> language extensions, including concurrency, exceptions, and foreign
> language interfaces. GHC is distributed under a BSD-style open source license.
>
> A wide variety of Haskell related resources (tutorials, libraries,
> specifications, documentation, compilers, interpreters, references,
> contact information, links to research groups) are available from the
> Haskell home page (see below).
>
>
> On-line GHC-related resources
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
>
> Relevant URLs on the World-Wide Web:
>
> GHC home page https://www.haskell.org/ghc/
> GHC developers' home page https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/
> Haskell home page https://www.haskell.org/
>
>
> Supported Platforms
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
>
> The list of platforms we support, and the people responsible for them,
> is here:
>
> https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Contributors
>
> Ports to other platforms are possible with varying degrees of
> difficulty. The Building Guide describes how to go about porting to a
> new platform:
>
> https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Building
>
>
> Developers
> ~~~~~~~~~~
>
> We welcome new contributors. Instructions on accessing our source
> code repository, and getting started with hacking on GHC, are
> available from the GHC's developer's site run by Trac:
>
> https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/
>
>
> Mailing lists
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~
>
> We run mailing lists for GHC users and bug reports; to subscribe, use
> the web interfaces at
>
> https://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/glasgow-haskell-users
> https://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ghc-tickets
>
> There are several other haskell and ghc-related mailing lists on
> www.haskell.org; for the full list, see
>
> https://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo
>
> Some GHC developers hang out on #haskell on IRC, too:
>
> https://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/IRC_channel
>
> Please report bugs using our bug tracking system. Instructions on
> reporting bugs can be found here:
>
> https://www.haskell.org/ghc/reportabug
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