GHC 9.6.1 is now available

bgamari - 2023-03-10

The GHC team is very pleased to announce the availability of GHC 9.6.1. As usual, binaries and source distributions are available at downloads.haskell.org.

Beginning with GHC 9.6.1, GHC can be built as a cross-compiler to WebAssembly and JavaScript. This is an important step towards robust support for compiling Haskell to the Web, but there are a few caveats to be aware of in the 9.6 series:

Both the Javascript and WebAssembly backends are still at an early stage of development and are present in this release as a technology preview
Using GHC as a cross-compiler is not as easy as we would like it to be; in particular, there are challenges related to Template Haskell
GHC is not yet run-time retargetable; a given GHC binary targets exactly one platform, and both WebAssembly and JavaScript are considered platforms for this purpose. Cross-compilers must be built from source by their users

We hope to lift all of these limitations in future releases.

Additionally, 9.6.1 includes:

Significant latency improvements in the non-moving garbage collector
Efficient runtime support for delimited continuations
Improvements in compiler error messages
Numerous improvements in the compiler’s memory usage

See the release notes for a comprehensive accounting of changes in this release.

As always, one can find a migration guide to aid in transitioning from older releases on the GHC Wiki. We have also recently started extending our release process to cover a wider set of Linux distributions. In particular, we now offer Rocky 8 and Ubuntu 20.04 binary distributions which cover RedHat-derivative and distributions using older glibc releases (namely 2.27), respectively.

Thanks to everyone who has contributed code, documentation, testing, and tickets to this release process. As this release represents upstream GHC’s first step towards supporting web targets, we are very excited to have this release out the door!

Cheers,