============================================================= The (Interactive) Glasgow Haskell Compiler -- version 7.0.1 ============================================================= The GHC Team is pleased to announce a new major release of GHC. Since the 6.12 branch we are delighted that more than 60 people have contributed patches to GHC or the accompanying libraries and utilities. There have been a number of significant changes since the last major release, including: * GHC now defaults to the Haskell 2010 language standard * -fglasgow-exts is now deprecated, in favour of the individual extension flags * On POSIX platforms, there is a new I/O manager based on epoll/kqueue/poll, which allows multithreaded I/O code to scale to a much larger number (100k+) of threads * GHC now includes an LLVM code generator which, for certain code, can bring some nice performance improvements * The type checker has been overhauled, which means it is now able to correctly handle interactions between the type systemextensions * The inliner has been overhauled, which should in general give better performance while reducing unnecessary code-size explosion * Large parts of the runtime system have been overhauled, including fixing several instances of pathological performance when there are large numbers of threads * Due to changes in the runtime system, if you are using Control.Parallel.Strategies from the parallel package, please upgrade to at least version 2 (preferably version 3) * The full Haskell import syntax can now been used to bring modules into scope in GHCi * GHC now comes with a more recent mingw bundled on Windows, which includes a fix for windres on Windows 7 * There is a new -fno-ghci-sandbox flag, which stops GHCi running computations in a separate thread; in particular, this works around an issue running GLUT from GHCi on OS X The full release notes are here: http://new-www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/7.0.1/html/users_guide/release-7-0-1.htm... How to get it ~~~~~~~~~~~~~ The easy way is to go to the web page, which should be self-explanatory: http://www.haskell.org/ghc/ We supply binary builds in the native package format for many platforms, and the source distribution is available from the same place. Packages will appear as they are built - if the package for your system isn't available yet, please try again later. Background ~~~~~~~~~~ Haskell is a standard lazy functional programming language; the current language version is Haskell 98, agreed in December 1998 and revised December 2002. GHC is a state-of-the-art programming suite for Haskell. Included is an optimising compiler generating good code for a variety of platforms, together with an interactive system for convenient, quick development. The distribution includes space and time profiling facilities, a large collection of libraries, and support for various language extensions, including concurrency, exceptions, and foreign language interfaces (C, whatever). GHC is distributed under a BSD-style open source license. A wide variety of Haskell related resources (tutorials, libraries, specifications, documentation, compilers, interpreters, references, contact information, links to research groups) are available from the Haskell home page (see below). On-line GHC-related resources ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Relevant URLs on the World-Wide Web: GHC home page http://www.haskell.org/ghc/ GHC developers' home page http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ Haskell home page http://www.haskell.org/ Supported Platforms ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ The list of platforms we support, and the people responsible for them, is here: http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Contributors Ports to other platforms are possible with varying degrees of difficulty. The Building Guide describes how to go about porting to a new platform: http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Building Developers ~~~~~~~~~~ We welcome new contributors. Instructions on accessing our source code repository, and getting started with hacking on GHC, are available from the GHC's developer's site run by Trac: http://hackage.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ Mailing lists ~~~~~~~~~~~~~ We run mailing lists for GHC users and bug reports; to subscribe, use the web interfaces at http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/glasgow-haskell-users http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/glasgow-haskell-bugs There are several other haskell and ghc-related mailing lists on www.haskell.org; for the full list, see http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/ Some GHC developers hang out on #haskell on IRC, too: http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/IRC_channel Please report bugs using our bug tracking system. Instructions on reporting bugs can be found here: http://www.haskell.org/ghc/reportabug