[Haskell-cafe] The State of GHC 8.10

[Ben Gamari]

Travis Cardwell via Haskell-Cafe <haskell-cafe at haskell.org> writes:

> Hi Zubin,
>
> Thank you for message!
>
> On Sat, Aug 21, 2021 at 6:58 PM Zubin Duggal wrote:
>> As the oldest currently active branch, it is currently a priority to
>> retire the 8.10 branch of GHC from active development as soon as
>> possible.
>
> With talk of retiring the 8.10 branch, I think it might be worthwhile to
> remind folks that GHC 8.10(.6) is still the most recent release that is
> suitable for production use.  GHC 9.0.1 is *not* suitable for production
> use due to major issues, and GHC 9.0.2 is not ready yet.
>
Indeed 9.0.2 is not yet ready. However, we are actively working towards
remedying this. Likewise, 9.2.1 is very close to being released.

To clarify: by "retiring 8.10", Zubin means that the 8.10 series is
moving into a truly "critical-bugfix-only" mode. This contrasts with
our treatment of 8.10 thusfar, where we have been both trying to fix
general bugs *and* backport rudimentary Darwin/ARM support. In this
sense, 8.10 has been a rather odd release; in nearly all other releases
the "feature-set" of a compiler release series is fixed after the N.N.1
release is cut.

To stabilize Darwin support, our work has been focussed on 8.10. At this
point we believe that 8.10.7 should be a very usable release and
therefore we will focus our further efforts on 9.0 and 9.2.

If after 8.10.7 we find an issue that renders the compiler unusable for
a large numbers of users, we will of course make another release.
However, we also very much hope that this won't be necessary.

Cheers,

- Ben
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