[ANNOUNCE] Glasgow Haskell Compiler 8.10.1-alpha2 released

[Ben Gamari]

Hello all,

The GHC team is happy to announce the availability of the first alpha
release in the GHC 8.10 series. Source and binary distributions are
available at the usual place:

    https://downloads.haskell.org/ghc/8.10.1-alpha2/

GHC 8.10.1 will bring a number of new features including:

 * The new UnliftedNewtypes extension allowing newtypes around unlifted
   types.

 * The new StandaloneKindSignatures extension allows users to give
   top-level kind signatures to type, type family, and class
   declarations.

 * A new warning, -Wderiving-defaults, to draw attention to ambiguous
   deriving clauses

 * A number of improvements in code generation, including changes

 * A new GHCi command, :instances, for listing the class instances
   available for a type.

 * An upgraded Windows toolchain lifting the MAX_PATH limitation

 * A new, low-latency garbage collector.

 * Improved support profiling, including support for sending profiler
   samples to the eventlog, allowing correlation between the profile and
   other program events

This release is the second alpha of the 8.10 pre-release cycle. The
release will be a release candidate in roughly three weeks. If all goes
well the final release will be cut roughly two weeks after the
candidate, in mid-January.

This being an alpha release, there are a few issues that are still
outstanding:

 * The new Alpine Linux binary distribution is not present due to an
   apparent correctness issue [1]; any help Alpine users can offer here
   would be greatly appreciated.

 * We have yet to sort out compliance with Apple's notarization
   requirements [2] which will be likely be necessary for users of
   macOS Catalina.

   However, until this has been sorted out Catalina users can exempt the
   current macOS binary distribution from the notarization requirement
   themselves by running `xattr -cr .` on the unpacked tree before
   running `make install`.

 * There is one remaining non-regression correctness issue which we plan
   to fix for the final 8.10.1 but that is not fixed in this release.

Please do test this release and let us know if you encounter any other
issues.

Cheers,

- Ben


[1] https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/issues/17508
[2] https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/issues/17418
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