[Haskell-cafe] [ANNOUNCE] GHC 8.0.1 is available!

[Ben Gamari]

           ===============================================
            The Glasgow Haskell Compiler -- version 8.0.1
           ===============================================

The GHC developers are very pleased to announce the release of the first
new super-major version of our Haskell compiler in six years, GHC 8.0.1.

This release features dozens of exciting developments including,

 * A more refined interface for implicit call-stacks, allowing libraries to
   provide more helpful runtime error messages to users

 * The introduction of the DuplicateRecordFields language extension, allowing
   multiple record types to declare fields of the same name

 * Significant improvements in error message readability and content, including
   facilities for libraries to provide custom error messages, more aggressive
   warnings for fragile rewrite rules, and more helpful errors for missing
   imports

 * A rewritten and substantially more thorough pattern match checker, providing
   more precise exhaustiveness checking in GADT pattern matches

 * More reliable debugging information including experimental backtrace support,
   allowing better integration with traditional debugging tools

 * Support for desugaring do-notation to use Applicative combinators, allowing
   the intuitive do notation to be used in settings which previously required
   the direct use of Applicative combinators

 * The introduction of Strict and StrictData language extensions, allowing
   modules to be compiled with strict-by-default evaluation of bindings

 * Great improvements in portability, including more reliable linking on
   Windows, a new PPC64 code generator, support for the AIX operating system,
   unregisterised m68k support, and significant stabilization on ARM targets

 * A greatly improved user's guide, with beautiful and modern PDF and HTML
   output

 * Introduction of type application syntax, reducing the need for proxies

 * More complete support for pattern synonyms, including record pattern synonyms
   and the ability to export patterns "bundled" with a type, as you would a data
   constructor

 * Support for injective type families and recursive superclass relationships

 * An improved generics representation leveraging GHC's support for type-level
   literals

 * The TypeInType extension, which unifies types and kinds, allowing GHC to
   reason about kind equality and enabling promotion of more constructs to the
   type level

 * ...and more!

A more thorough list of the changes included in this release can be found in the
release notes,

    https://downloads.haskell.org/~ghc/8.0.1/docs/html/users_guide/8.0.1-notes.html

As always, we have collected various points of interest for users of previous
GHC releases on the GHC 8.0 migration page,

    https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Migration/8.0

Please let us know if you encounter anything missing or unclear on this page.

This release is the culmination of nearly eighteen months of effort by over one
hundred contributors. We'd like to thank everyone who has contributed code, bug
reports, and feedback over the past year. It's only because of their efforts
that GHC continues to evolve.


How to get it
~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Both the source tarball and binary distributions for a wide variety of platforms
are available at,

    http://www.haskell.org/ghc/


Background
~~~~~~~~~~

Haskell is a standardized lazy functional programming language.

The Glasgow Haskell Compiler (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.


Supported Platforms
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The list of platforms we support, and the people responsible for them, can be
found on the GHC wiki

    http://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Platforms

Ports to other platforms are possible with varying degrees of difficulty. The
Building Guide describes how to go about porting to a new platform:

    http://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Building


Developers
~~~~~~~~~~

We welcome new contributors. Instructions on getting started with hacking on GHC
are available from GHC's developer site,

    http://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/


Community Resources
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

There are mailing lists for GHC users, develpoers, and monitoring bug tracker
activity; to subscribe, use the web interfaces at

    http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/glasgow-haskell-users
    http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ghc-devs
    http://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 the #ghc and #haskell of the Freenode IRC
network, too:

    http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/IRC_channel

Please report bugs using our bug tracking system. Instructions on reporting bugs
can be found here:

    http://www.haskell.org/ghc/reportabug
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