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

[Ben Gamari]

The GHC team is very pleased to announce the availability of GHC 9.6.1.
As usual, binaries and source distributions are available at
downloads.haskell.org:

    https://downloads.haskell.org/ghc/9.6.1/

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 includes:

 - 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][migration-guide]. 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.

Thanks to everyone who has contributed code, documentation, testing, and
tickets to this release process. As this release represents upstream GHC's
first step towards supporting web targets, we are very excited to have this
release out the door!

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/docs/users_guide/9.6.1-notes.html
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