GHC 8.6.4 released

Ben Gamari - 2019-03-05

The GHC team is very happy to announce the availability of GHC 8.6.4, a bugfix release in the GHC 8.6 series. The source distribution, binary distributions, and documentation for this release are available at downloads.haskell.org.

The 8.6.4 release fixes several regressions present in 8.6.3 including:

  • A regression resulting in segmentation faults on Windows introduced by the fix for #16071 backported in 8.6.3. This fix has been reverted, meaning that 8.6.4 is once again susceptible to #16071. #16071 will be fixed in GHC 8.8.1.

  • A bug resulting in incorrect locking on Darwin, potentially resulting in hangs at shutdown (#16150)

  • A few bugs in the profiled runtime resulting in the potential for memory unsafety has been fixed (#15508).

  • The process and transformers libraries shipped properly reflect released Hackage releases (#16199)

  • A bug where TH name resolution would break in a plugin context has been fixed (#16104)

  • Compilers that do not support TemplateHaskell no longer advertise such support in --supported-languages (#16331)

As a few of these issues are rather serious users are strongly encouraged to upgrade. See Trac for a full list of issues resolved in this release.

Note that this release ships with one significant but long-standing bug (#14251): Calls to functions taking both Float# and Double# may result in incorrect code generation when compiled using the LLVM code generator. This is not a new issue, it has existed as long as the LLVM code generator has existed; however, changes in code generation in 8.6 made it more likely that user code using only lifted types will trigger it.

Note also that this is the first release cut from our (yet again) revamped continuous integration infrastructure. While we have done a great deal of checking to ensure that the build configuration reflects that of previous releases, do let us know if something looks off.

Happy compiling!