The GHC developers are very pleased to announce the availability of the
third alpha release of GHC 9.14.1. Binary distributions, source
distributions, and documentation are available at [downloads.haskell.org]
GHC 9.14 will bring a number of new features and improvements, including:
* Significant improvements in specialisation:
* The `SPECIALISE` pragma now allows use of type application syntax
* The `SPECIALISE` pragma can be used to specialise for expression arguments
as well as type arguments.
* Specialisation is now considerably more reliable in the presence of
`newtype`s
* Significant improvements GHCi including:
* Correctness and performance improvements in the bytecode interpreter
* Features in the GHCi debugger
* Support for multiple home units in GHCi
* Implementation of the [Explicit Level Imports proposal][levels]
* `RequiredTypeArgments` can now be used in more contexts
* SSE/AVX2 support in the x86 native code generator backend
* A major update of the Windows toolchain
* ... and many more
A full accounting of changes can be found in the [release notes]. Given the
many specialisation improvements and their potential for regression, we would
very much appreciate testing and performance characterisation on downstream
workloads.
Note that while this release makes many improvements in the specialisation
optimisation, polymorphic specialisation will remain disabled by default in the
final release due to concern over regressions of the sort identified in
[#26329]. Users needing more aggressive specialisation can explicitly
enable this feature with the `-fpolymorphic-specialisation` flag. Depending
upon our experience with 9.14.1, we may enable this feature by default in a
later minor release.
This is the third alpha release of 9.14.1. This comes later than expected in
part due to work on a resolving a regression in the macOS 26 ([#26166])
which threatened the usability of the release. While a complete fix for this
issue is not present in this alpha, we have done enough work to have confidence
that it will be in finished for the release candidate which we expect should
come the week of 27 October.
We would like to thank the Zw3rk stake pool, Well-Typed, Mercury, Channable,
Tweag I/O, Serokell, 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 have made the Haskell ecosystem what it is today.
As always, do give this release a try and open a [ticket] if you see
anything amiss.
Cheers,
- Ben
[downloads.haskell.org] https://downloads.haskell.org/ghc/9.14.1-alpha3
[release notes]: https://downloads.haskell.org/ghc/9.14.1-alpha3/docs/users_guide/9.14.1-not…
[ticket]: https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/homepage/-/issues/new
[#26166]: https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/-/issues/26166
[#26329]: https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/-/issues/26329
[levels]: https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals/blob/master/proposals/0682-e…
