Hello everyone, I am pleased to at long last announce the third (and almost certainly last) release candidate of GHC 8.2.1. Binary and source distributions can be found at, https://downloads.haskell.org/~ghc/8.2.1-rc3/ This release candidate fixes a number of regressions from 8.0.2 found in -rc2, as well as a major correctness bug (#13615) present in several previous GHC major releases. Users taking advantage of parallelism in their programs will be strongly encouraged to upgrade to 8.2.1 once it is released. Among the other issues resolved in this candidate are, * Functionality allowing GHC to automatically use the ld.gold linker when available (see #13541). Not only has there recently been significant user demand for this feature, but this also serves to work around a performance bug in BFD ld affecting GHC 8.2 (#13739) * A regression resulting in the package cache file to be out-of-date after binary distribution installation (#13375) * Numerous type-checker bugs (#13625, #1370, #13782, #13871, #13594, #13879, #13881, #13875) * A bug wherein a thread blocked on a BLACKHOLE may not be woken up (#13751) * and many more... There are a few changes in release-engineering matters that should be mentioned, * Binary distributions for CentOS 6.7 have been dropped due to the release of CentOS 7.0 which can use Debian 8 binaries. If you would like us to continue to produce CentOS 6.7 bindists please let me know. * GHC HQ now also provides FreeBSD and OpenBSD distributions for amd64; this will allow us to more quickly ship distributions to users by eliminating the need for a long lag time between source release availability and having all binary distributions available. * There is a technology-preview of an AArch64 Linux binary distribution, as well as an ARM Linux build (although the latter won't be uploaded until a few hours from now). AArch64 support is quite preliminary but should be stable in 8.4 thanks to further linker fixes by Moritz Angerman. ARM should be stable. As always, let us know if you encounter problems. If all goes well we will hopefully have a final 8.2.1 release in the next two weeks. Finally, thanks for your patience during this admittedly quite drawn out release cycle. While it has been long, we are confident that the result will be worth the wait. Moreover, we have been steadily working on infrastructure which should shrink future release cycles and give us better testing between releases. More details on this coming soon. Happy testing, - Ben