GHC 8.8.1-alpha2 released

bgamari - 2019-06-19

The GHC team is pleased to announce the second and likely last alpha release of GHC 8.8.1. The source distribution, binary distributions, and documentation are available from 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)

  • Further work on the Hadrian build system

This release brings a number of fixes since alpha 1:

  • A number of linker fixes (#16779, #16784)

  • The process, binary, Cabal, time, terminfo libraries have all been bumped to their final release versions

  • A regression rendering TemplateHaskell unusable in cross-compiled configurations has been fixed (#16331)

  • A regression causing compiler panics on compilation of some programs has been fixed (#16449)

  • -Wmissing-home-modules now handles hs-boot files correctly (#16551)

  • A regression causing some programs to fail at runtime has been fixed (#16066)

Due to on-going work on our release and testing infrastructure this cycle is proceeding at a pace significantly slower than expected. However, we anticipate that this investment will allow us to release a more reliable, easier-to-install compiler on the planned six-month release cadence in the future.

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

Happy compiling!