Hello everyone, Here's an addendum to the announcment as it ommitted an important detail: GHC 8.6.1 is only guaranteed to work properly with tooling which uses lib:Cabal version 2.4.0.1 or later. As such, GHC 8.6.1 works best with `cabal-install` 2.4.0.0 or later; please upgrade to `cabal-install` 2.4.0.0 if you haven't already. Note that cabal-install 2.4 supports all GHC versions back till GHC 7.0.4 and we also strongly recommend to use the latest available stable release of `cabal` even with older GHC releases as bugfixes and improvements aren't always backported to older Cabal releases as well as to be able to benefit from recently added CABAL format features[8] (or be able to access package releases on Hackage[9] which rely on those features) which require recent enough versions of Cabal as well. Note that binaries aren't available on cabal's download page[1] yet. If you're on Ubuntu or Debian, you can get a compiled cabal-install 2.4 `.deb` package via Apt from - https://launchpad.net/~hvr/+archive/ubuntu/ghc or - http://downloads.haskell.org/debian/ respectively. Binary versions for macOS and Windows are also expected to become available via [2] and [3] soon (and also at [1]). In the meantime, if you already have GHC 7.10 or later (together with a compatible `cabal` executable) installed, you can easily install cabal 2.4 yourself from Hackage[9] by invoking cabal install cabal-install-2.4.0.0 and making sure that the resulting `cabal` executable is accessible via your $PATH; you can check with `cabal --version` which should emit something along the lines of $ cabal --version cabal-install version 2.4.0.0 compiled using version 2.4.0.1 of the Cabal library Finally, the Haskell Platform[4] release for GHC 8.6.1 should be available soon as well which provides yet another recommended "standard way to get GHC and related tools"[5] in a uniform way across multiple operating systems. See [4] and [5] for more details about the standard Haskell Platform distribution. [1]: https://www.haskell.org/cabal/download.html [2]: https://haskell.futurice.com/ [3]: https://hub.zhox.com/posts/chocolatey-introduction/ [4]: https://www.haskell.org/platform/ [5]: https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-July/009379.html [6]: https://launchpad.net/~hvr/+archive/ubuntu/ghc [7]: http://downloads.haskell.org/debian/ [8]: https://cabal.readthedocs.io/en/latest/file-format-changelog.html [9]: http://hackage.haskell.org/ -- Herbert On 2018-09-21 at 20:57:02 -0400, Ben Gamari wrote:
Hello everyone,
The GHC team is pleased to announce the availability of GHC 8.6.1, the fourth major release in the GHC 8 series. The source distribution, binary distributions, and documentation for this release are available at
https://downloads.haskell.org/~ghc/8.6.1
The 8.6 release fixes over 400 bugs from the 8.4 series and introduces a number of exciting features. These most notably include:
* A new deriving mechanism, `deriving via`, providing a convenient way for users to extend Haskell's typeclass deriving mechanism
* Quantified constraints, allowing forall quantification in constraint contexts
* An early version of the GHCi `:doc` command
* The `ghc-heap-view` package, allowing introspection into the structure of GHC's heap
* Valid hole fit hints, helping the user to find terms to fill typed holes in their programs
* The BlockArguments extension, allowing the `$` operator to be omitted in some unambiguous contexts
* An exciting new plugin mechanism, source plugins, allowing plugins to inspect and modify a wide variety of compiler representations.
* Improved recompilation checking when plugins are used
* Significantly better handling of macOS linker command size limits, avoiding linker errors while linking large projects
* The next phase of the MonadFail proposal, enabling -XMonadFailDesugaring by default
A full list of the changes in this release can be found in the release notes:
https://downloads.haskell.org/~ghc/8.6.1/docs/html/users_guide/8.6.1-notes.h...
Perhaps of equal importance, GHC 8.6 is the second major release made under GHC's accelerated six-month release schedule and the first set of binary distributions built primarily using our new continuous integration scheme. While the final 8.6 release is around three weeks later than initially scheduled due to late-breaking bug reports, we expect that the 8.8 release schedule shouldn't be affected.
Thanks to everyone who has contributed to developing, documenting, and testing this release!
As always, let us know if you encounter trouble.
How to get it ~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The easy way is to go to the web page, which should be self-explanatory:
We supply binary builds in the native package format for many platforms, and the source distribution is available from the same place.
Packages will appear as they are built - if the package for your system isn't available yet, please try again later.
Background ~~~~~~~~~~
Haskell is a standard lazy functional programming language.
GHC is a state-of-the-art programming suite for Haskell. Included is an optimising compiler generating efficient code for a variety of platforms, together with an interactive system for convenient, quick development. The distribution includes space and time profiling facilities, a large collection of libraries, and support for various language extensions, including concurrency, exceptions, and foreign language interfaces. GHC is distributed under a BSD-style open source license.
A wide variety of Haskell related resources (tutorials, libraries, specifications, documentation, compilers, interpreters, references, contact information, links to research groups) are available from the Haskell home page (see below).
On-line GHC-related resources ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Relevant URLs on the World-Wide Web:
GHC home page https://www.haskell.org/ghc/ GHC developers' home page https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ Haskell home page https://www.haskell.org/
Supported Platforms ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
The list of platforms we support, and the people responsible for them, is here:
https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Contributors
Ports to other platforms are possible with varying degrees of difficulty. The Building Guide describes how to go about porting to a new platform:
https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Building
Developers ~~~~~~~~~~
We welcome new contributors. Instructions on accessing our source code repository, and getting started with hacking on GHC, are available from the GHC's developer's site run by Trac:
https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/
Mailing lists ~~~~~~~~~~~~~
We run mailing lists for GHC users and bug reports; to subscribe, use the web interfaces at
https://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/glasgow-haskell-users https://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ghc-tickets
There are several other haskell and ghc-related mailing lists on www.haskell.org; for the full list, see
https://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo
Some GHC developers hang out on #haskell on IRC, too:
https://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/IRC_channel
Please report bugs using our bug tracking system. Instructions on reporting bugs can be found here: