A Windows Installer for this snapshot is now available via
the GHC downloads page,
http://haskell.org/ghc/download_ghc_snapshot.html
enjoy
--sof
----- Original Message -----
From: "Julian Seward (Intl Vendor)"
There have been a number of significant improvements made to GHC since the 5.02 sources were branched off the main GHC development tree, but we're not quite ready to make a full 5.04 release yet. However, we're keen to get feedback on the new features from people that don't have easy access to CVS or don't have the time & patience to build GHC from scratch, so we're making a snapshot release of the current GHC, in source and binary form.
There are NO GUARANTEES as to the stability of this release, although we do know it has passed our basic three-stage bootstrap test and run the regression tests successfully. In some cases the documentation hasn't been fully updated to reflect the new features yet.
Briefly, the changes relative to 5.02.2 are:
- The type system now supports arbitrary rank polymorphism, given appropriate type annotations.
- Heap profiling has had a major overhaul and now supports retainer profiling and biographical profiling ala nhc98.
- Major improvements to the native code generators. You can now compile any and all code through them, including the Prelude.
- The FFI syntax has been updated to match the latest version of the FFI Haskell 98 Addendum.
- newtypes support deriving *any* class for which the underlying type is also an instance.
- Linear implicit parameters: a highly experimental feature.
- GHCi has several new commands: - ':show bindings' to list the bindings made on the command line, - ':show modules' to show which modules are loaded, - ':module' has been enhanced as per the discussion on the mailing list (syntax is still experimental - feedback welcome). - ':browse' similar to Hugs' :browse command.
And many other minor changes & bugfixes.
At the moment there is just the sources and a binary build for x86-linux available. We may add builds for other if they become available.
You can get it from http://haskell.cs.yale.edu/ghc/download_ghc_snapshot.html
Enjoy!
The GHC Development Team.