[Haskell] ANNOUNCE: GHC version 6.4

[Simon Marlow]

   =============================================================
    The (Interactive) Glasgow Haskell Compiler -- version 6.4
   =============================================================

The GHC Team is delighted to announce a new major release of GHC.  It
has been a long time since the last major release (Dec 2003!), and a
lot has happened:

  - GADTs (Generalised Abstract Datatypes) are supported  

  - STM (Software Transactional Memory) is implemented

  - Full support for Cabal and a much improved package framework

  - Better support for mutually-recursive modules

  - A complete rewrite of the back end

  - Accurate source locations in error messages

  - Lots of new libraries

The full release notes are here:

  http://haskell.org/ghc/docs/6.4/html/users_guide/release-6-4.html

How to get it
~~~~~~~~~~~~~

If you haven't already done so, please fill in the GHC Survey:

        http://www.haskell.org/ghc/survey/start.cgi

We'll use the information you give us to improve future releases of GHC.

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

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

Binary packages will become available as they are built - if the package
for your system isn't available yet, please try again later.

We supply binary builds in the native package format for various
flavours of Linux and BSD, and in Windows Installer (MSI) form
for Windows folks.  Binary builds for other platforms are available
as a .tar.gz which can be installed wherever you want.  The source
distribution is also available from the same place.


Background
~~~~~~~~~~
Haskell is a standard lazy functional programming language; the
current language version is Haskell 98, agreed in December 1998 and
revised December 2002.

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, whatever).  GHC is distributed under a
BSD-style open source license.

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 (see below).


On-line GHC-related resources
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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

  * i386-unknown-{linux,*bsd,mingw32}
  * x86_64-unknown-linux
  * powerpc-apple-darwin (MacOS X)
  * powerpc-apple-linux
  * sparc-sun-solaris2 (may have bitrotted due to lack of attention)

Ports to other platforms are possible with varying degrees of
difficulty.  The builder's guide on the web site gives a complete
run-down of what ports work and how to go about porting to a new
platform; it can be found at

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


Mailing lists
~~~~~~~~~~~~~
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
	
	http://sourceforge.net/projects/ghc/

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

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