The GHC developers are very pleased to announce the availability of the
final release of GHC 9.8.1. Binary distributions, source
distributions, and documentation are available at downloads.haskell.org:
https://downloads.haskell.org/ghc/9.8.1
GHC 9.8 brings a number of new features and improvements, including:
* Preliminary support the `TypeAbstractions` language extension,
allowing types to be bound in type declarations [TypeAbstractions].
* Support for the `ExtendedLiterals` extension, providing syntax for
non-word-sized numeric literals in the surface language
[extended-literals]
* Improved rewrite rule matching behavior, allowing limited matching of
higher-order patterns
* Better support for user-defined warnings by way of the `WARNING`
pragma [warnings]
* The introduction of the new `GHC.TypeError.Unsatisfiable`
constraint, allowing more predictable user-defined type errors
[unsatisfiable]
* Implementation of the export deprecation proposal, allowing module
exports to be marked with `DEPRECATE` pragmas [deprecated-exports]
* The addition of build semaphore support for parallel compilation;
with coming support in `cabal-install` this will allow better use of
parallelism in multi-package builds [jsem]
* More efficient representation of info table provenance information,
reducing binary sizes by over 50% in some cases when
`-finfo-table-map` is in use
A full accounting of changes can be found in the [release notes][].
Plans for GHC's future releases can be found on the [GHC Wiki][status].
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.
Happy compiling,
~ Ben
[TypeAbstractions]: https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals/blob/master/proposals/0425-d…
[extended-literals]: https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals/blob/master/proposals/0451-s…
[unsatisfiable]: https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals/blob/master/proposals/0433-u…
[warnings]: https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals/blob/master/proposals/0541-w…
[deprecated-exports]: https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals/blob/master/proposals/0134-d…
[jsem]: https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals/blob/master/proposals/0540-j…
[release notes]: https://downloads.haskell.org/ghc/9.8.1/docs/users_guide/9.8.1-notes.html
[status]: https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/-/wikis/GHC-status
