[Haskell-cafe] [ANNOUNCE] GHC 8.8.1-alpha2 is now available

Ben Gamari ben at well-typed.com
Sat Jun 15 19:35:54 UTC 2019


Hello everyone,

The GHC team is pleased to announce the second and likely last alpha
release of GHC 8.8.1. The source distribution, binary distributions, and
documentation are available at

    https://downloads.haskell.org/~ghc/8.8.1-alpha2

A draft of the release notes is also available [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:

 * 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

 * 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

 * More locations where users can write `forall` (GHC Proposal #0007)

 * Further work on the Hadrian build system

This release brings a number of fixes since alpha 1:

 * A number of linker fixes (#16779, #16784)

 * The process, binary, Cabal, time, terminfo libraries have all been
   bumped to their final release versions

 * A regression rendering TemplateHaskell unusable in cross-compiled
   configurations has been fixed (#16331)

 * A regression causing compiler panics on compilation of some programs
   has been fixed (#16449)

 * -Wmissing-home-modules now handles hs-boot files correctly (#16551)

 * A regression causing some programs to fail at runtime has been fixed
   (#16066)

Due to on-going work on our release and testing infrastructure this
cycle is proceeding at a pace significantly slower than expected.
However, we anticipate that this investment will allow us to release a
more reliable, easier-to-install compiler on the planned six-month
release cadence in the future.

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

Happy compiling!

Cheers,

- Ben

[1] https://downloads.haskell.org/ghc/8.8.1-alpha2/docs/html/users_guide/8.8.1-notes.html
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