GHC 8.8.1-alpha1 released

bgamari - 2019-04-25

The GHC team is pleased to announce the first alpha release of GHC 8.8.1. The source distribution, binary distributions, and documentation are available at downloads.haskell.org. A draft of the release notes is also available.

This release is the culmination of over 3000 commits by over one hundred contributors and has several new features and numerous bug fixes relative to GHC 8.6:

• Profiling now works correctly on 64-bit Windows (although still may be problematic on 32-bit Windows due to platform limitations; see #15934)

• A new code layout algorithm for amd64’s native code generator

• The introduction of a late lambda-lifting pass which may reduce allocations significantly for some programs.

• Further work on Trees That Grow, enabling improved code re-use of the Haskell AST in tooling

• More locations where users can write forall (GHC Proposal #7)

• Continued work on the Hadrian build system

This release starts the pre-release cycle for GHC 8.8. This cycle is starting quite a bit later than expected due recent work on GHC’s CI and release infrastructure. See the GHC Blog for more on this.

As always, if anything looks amiss do let us know.

Happy compiling!