GHC 9.10.1-alpha1 is now available

bgamari - 2024-03-13

The GHC developers are very pleased to announce the availability of the first alpha release of GHC 9.10.1. Binary distributions, source distributions, and documentation are available at downloads.haskell.org.

We hope to have this release available via ghcup shortly.

GHC 9.10 will bring a number of new features and improvements, including:

  • The introduction of the GHC2024 language edition, building upon GHC2021 with the addition of a number of widely-used extensions.

  • Partial implementation of the GHC Proposal #281, allowing visible quantification to be used in the types of terms.

  • Extension of LinearTypes to allow linear let and where bindings

  • The implementation of the exception backtrace proposal, allowing the annotation of exceptions with backtraces, as well as other user-defined context

  • Further improvements in the info table provenance mechanism, reducing code size to allow IPE information to be enabled more widely

  • Javascript FFI support in the WebAssembly backend

  • Improvements in the fragmentation characteristics of the low-latency non-moving garbage collector.

  • … and many more

A full accounting of changes can be found in the release notes. As always, GHC’s release status, including planned future releases, can be found on the GHC Wiki status.

Many will notice that this release comes a fair bit later than the previously-announced schedule. While this delay has been attributable to a variety factors, the most recent cause is a set of issues with GHC 9.10’s binary distributions on Windows (#24542). Instead of continuing to hold up the release process while we sort out this situation, we have instead provided this alpha without the usual assortment of Windows binary distributions. We expect to have this resolved by alpha 2; apologies to eager Windows testers for this delay.

We would like to thank GitHub, IOG, the Zw3rk stake pool, Well-Typed, Tweag I/O, Serokell, Equinix, SimSpace, the Haskell Foundation, and other anonymous contributors whose on-going financial and in-kind support has facilitated GHC maintenance and release management over the years. Finally, this release would not have been possible without the hundreds of open-source contributors whose work comprise this release.

As always, do give this release a try and open a ticket if you see anything amiss.