ANNOUNCE: GHC 5.02.3 released

[Simon Marlow]

   The (Interactive) Glasgow Haskell Compiler -- version 5.02.3
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We are pleased to announce a new patchlevel release of the Glasgow
Haskell Compiler (GHC), version 5.02.3.  The source distribution is
freely available via the World-Wide Web, under a BSD-style license.
See below for download details.  Pre-built packages for Linux,
FreeBSD, Solaris and Win32 are also available (or will appear
shortly).

Haskell is a standard lazy functional programming language; the
current language version is Haskell 98, agreed in December 1998.

GHC is a state-of-the-art programming suite for Haskell.  Included is
an optimising compiler generating good 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 (C, C++, whatever).

A wide variety of Haskell related resources (tutorials, libraries,
specifications, documentation, compilers, interpreters, references,
contact information, links to research groups) are available from the
Haskell home page at

        http://www.haskell.org/

GHC's Web page lives at

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



 What's new in 5.02.3
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Some important bugfixes:

   - now works with gcc 3.x
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   - works with newer glibc releases on Linux

   - loading parsers generated by Happy with the -ag flags
     into GHCi now works

   - fix for excessive recompilation when using --make

   - tryTakeMVar now works

   - fix some problems with the dynamic linker when loading
     C libraries into GHCi (using Gtk+HS from GHCi should now
     work).

and various other minor fixes.

NOTE: object files created by this vesrion of GHC may be incompatible
with object files created by older versions of GHC, so be sure to
recompile any pre-compiled libraries you may have lying around.


 How to get it
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The easy way is to go to the WWW page, which should be
self-explanatory:

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

We supply binary builds in the native package format for various
flavours of Linux and BSD, and in InstallShield form for Windows
folks.  Everybody else gets a .tar.gz which can be installed where you
want.

Once you have the distribution, please follow the pointers in the
README file to find all of the documentation about this release.



 On-line GHC-related resources
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Relevant URLs on the World-Wide Web:

GHC home page             http://www.haskell.org/ghc/
Haskell home page         http://www.haskell.org/
comp.lang.functional FAQ  http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~gmh/faq.html



 System requirements
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To compile programs with GHC, you need a machine with 64+MB memory, GNU
C
and perl. This release is known to work on the following platforms:

  * i386-unknown-{linux,freebsd,mingw32}
  * sparc-sun-solaris2
  * alpha-dec-osf3

Ports to the following platforms should be relatively easy (for a
wunderhacker), but haven't been tested due to lack of time/hardware:

  * hppa1.1-hp-hpux{9,10}
  * i386-unknown-solaris2
  * mips-sgi-irix{5,6}
  * {rs6000,powerpc}-ibm-aix

The builder's guide included in distribution gives a complete
run-down of what ports work; an on-line version can be found at

   http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/latest/building/building-guide.html



 Mailing lists
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We run mailing lists for GHC users and bug reports; to subscribe, use
the web interfaces at

	http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/glasgow-haskell-users
	http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/glasgow-haskell-bugs

There are several other haskell and ghc-related mailing lists on
www.haskell.org; for the full list, see

	http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/

Please report bugs using our SourceForge page at
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	http://sourceforge.net/projects/ghc/

or send them to glasgow-haskell-bugs@haskell.org.

GHC users hang out on glasgow-haskell-users@haskell.org.  Bleeding
edge CVS users party on cvs-ghc@haskell.org.