[Haskell-cafe] [ANNOUNCE] GHC 9.6.1-alpha2 is now available

[Artem Pelenitsyn]

Thanks a lot, Ben and devs, for all the hard work!

Would it be possible to mention the JS and WASM backends in the release
notes? Is it a simple oversight that there are not there, or you want to
wait until a release where they are more mature?

--
Best, Artem


On Mon, Jan 30, 2023, 1:22 PM Ben Gamari <ben at well-typed.com> wrote:

>
> The GHC team is very pleased to announce the availability of GHC
> 9.6.1-alpha2. As usual, binaries and source distributions are available
> at downloads.haskell.org:
>
>   https://downloads.haskell.org/ghc/9.6.1-alpha2/
>
> Beginning with GHC 9.6.1, GHC can be built as a cross-compiler to
> WebAssembly and JavaScript. This is an important step towards robust
> support for compiling Haskell to the Web, but there are a few caveats to
> be aware of in the 9.6 series:
>
>  - Both the Javascript and WebAssembly backends are still at an early
>    stage of development and are present in this release as a technology
>    preview
>
>  - Using GHC as a cross-compiler is not as easy as we would like it to
>    be; in particular, there are challenges related to Template Haskell.
>
>  - GHC is not yet run-time retargetable; a given GHC binary targets
>    exactly one platform, and both WebAssembly and JavaScript are
>    considered platforms for this purpose. Cross-compilers must be built
>    from source by their users
>
> We hope to lift all of these limitations in future releases.
>
> Additionally, 9.6.1 will include:
>
>  - Significant latency improvements in the non-moving garbage collector
>
>  - Efficient runtime support for delimited continuations
>
>  - Improvements in compiler error messages
>
>  - Numerous improvements in the compiler's memory usage
>
> See the [release notes] for a comprehensive accounting of changes in
> this release.
>
> As always, one can find a [migration guide] to aid in transitioning from
> older releases on the GHC Wiki. We have also recently started extending
> our release process to cover a wider set of Linux distributions. In
> particular, we now offer Rocky 8 and Ubuntu 20.04 binary distributions
> which cover RedHat-derivative and distributions using older `glibc`
> releases (namely 2.27), respectively.
>
> Please do give this release a try and open a [ticket] if you see
> anything amiss.
>
> Cheers,
>
> - Ben
>
>
> [ticket]: https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/issues/
> [migration-guide]:
> https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/-/wikis/migration/9.6
> [release notes]:
> https://downloads.haskell.org/ghc/9.6.1-alpha2/docs/users_guide/9.6.1-notes.html
> _______________________________________________
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>
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