[Haskell] ANNOUNCE: GHC version 7.0.1

[Ian Lynagh]

   =============================================================
    The (Interactive) Glasgow Haskell Compiler -- version 7.0.1
   =============================================================

The GHC Team is pleased to announce a new major release of GHC. Since
the 6.12 branch we are delighted that more than 60 people have
contributed patches to GHC or the accompanying libraries and utilities.

There have been a number of significant changes since the last major
release, including:

 * GHC now defaults to the Haskell 2010 language standard

 * -fglasgow-exts is now deprecated, in favour of the individual
   extension flags

 * On POSIX platforms, there is a new I/O manager based on
   epoll/kqueue/poll, which allows multithreaded I/O code to scale to a
   much larger number (100k+) of threads

 * GHC now includes an LLVM code generator which, for certain code, can
   bring some nice performance improvements

 * The type checker has been overhauled, which means it is now able to
   correctly handle interactions between the type systemextensions

 * The inliner has been overhauled, which should in general give better
   performance while reducing unnecessary code-size explosion

 * Large parts of the runtime system have been overhauled, including
   fixing several instances of pathological performance when there
   are large numbers of threads

 * Due to changes in the runtime system, if you are using
   Control.Parallel.Strategies from the parallel package, please upgrade
   to at least version 2 (preferably version 3)

 * The full Haskell import syntax can now been used to bring modules
   into scope in GHCi

 * GHC now comes with a more recent mingw bundled on Windows, which
   includes a fix for windres on Windows 7

 * There is a new -fno-ghci-sandbox flag, which stops GHCi running
   computations in a separate thread; in particular, this works around
   an issue running GLUT from GHCi on OS X

The full release notes are here:

  http://new-www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/7.0.1/html/users_guide/release-7-0-1.html

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

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

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

We supply binary builds in the native package format for many
platforms, and the source distribution is available from the same
place.

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


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/
GHC developers' home page  http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/
Haskell home page          http://www.haskell.org/


Supported Platforms
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The list of platforms we support, and the people responsible for them,
is here:

   http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Contributors

Ports to other platforms are possible with varying degrees of
difficulty.  The Building Guide describes how to go about porting to a
new platform:

    http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Building


Developers
~~~~~~~~~~

We welcome new contributors.  Instructions on accessing our source
code repository, and getting started with hacking on GHC, are
available from the GHC's developer's site run by Trac:

  http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/


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/

Some GHC developers hang out on #haskell on IRC, too:

    http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/IRC_channel

Please report bugs using our bug tracking system.  Instructions on
reporting bugs can be found here:

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