[ANNOUNCE] GHC 8.8.1 is now available

[Ben Gamari]

Hello everyone,

The GHC team is pleased to announce the release candidate for GHC 8.8.1.
The source distribution, binary distributions, and documentation are
available at

    https://downloads.haskell.org/ghc/8.8.1

This release is the culmination of over 3000 commits by over one hundred
contributors and has several new features and numerous bug fixes
relative to GHC 8.6:

 * Visible kind applications are now supported (GHC Proposal #15)

 * Profiling now works correctly on 64-bit Windows (although still may
   be problematic on 32-bit Windows due to platform limitations; see
   #15934)

 * A new code layout algorithm for amd64's native code generator
   significantly improving the runtime performance of some kernels

 * The introduction of a late lambda-lifting pass which may reduce
   allocations significantly for some programs.

 * Further work on Trees That Grow, enabling improved code re-use of the
   Haskell AST in tooling

 * Users can write `forall` in more contexts (GHC Proposal #7)

 * The pattern-match checker is now more precise in the presence of
   strict fields with uninhabited types.

 * A comprehensive audit of GHC's memory ordering barriers has been
   performed, resulting in a number of fixes that should significantly
   improve the reliability of programs on architectures with
   weakly-ordered memory models (e.g. PowerPC, many ARM and AArch64
   implementations).

 * A long-standing linker limitation rendering GHCi unusable with
   projects with cyclic symbol dependencies has been fixed (#13786)

 * Further work on the Hadrian build system

 * Countless miscellaneous bug-fixes

Unfortunately, due to a build issue (#17108) found late in the release process
i386 Windows builds are currently unavailable. These will be provided in
the coming weeks.

As always, if anything looks amiss do let us know.

Happy compiling!

Cheers,

- Ben


[1] https://downloads.haskell.org/ghc/8.8.1/docs/html/users_guide/8.8.1-notes.html
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