Hello everyone, The GHC team is pleased to announce the release candidate for GHC 8.8.1. The source distribution, binary distributions, and documentation are available at https://downloads.haskell.org/ghc/8.8.1-rc1 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: * 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 * 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 #0007) * 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 * Numerous bug-fixes As always, if anything looks amiss do let us know. Happy compiling! Cheers, - Ben [1] https://downloads.haskell.org/ghc/8.8.1-rc1/docs/html/users_guide/8.8.1-note...