GHC 8.8.1 released

bgamari - 2019-08-26

The GHC team is very pleased to announce the reelease of GHC 8.8.1. The source distribution, binary distributions, and documentation are available at downloads.haskell.org.

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:

• Visible kind applications are now supported (GHC Proposal #15)

• 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 significantly improving the runtime performance of some kernels

• 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)

• The pattern-match checker is now more precise in the presence of strict fields with uninhabited types.

• A comprehensive audit of GHC’s memory ordering barriers has been performed, resulting in a number of fixes that should significantly improve the reliability of programs on architectures with weakly-ordered memory models (e.g. PowerPC, many ARM and AArch64 implementations).

• A long-standing linker limitation rendering GHCi unusable with projects with cyclic symbol dependencies has been fixed (#13786)

• Further work on the Hadrian build system

• Countless miscellaneous bug-fixes

Unfortunately, due to a build issue (#17108) found late in the release process i386 Windows builds are currently unavailable. These will be provided in the coming weeks.

cabal-install users should note that cabal-install-3.0 or later is required for use with GHC 8.8.

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

Happy compiling!