Hello everyone, The GHC team is pleased to announce the availability of GHC 8.4.2. The source distribution, binary distributions, and documentation for this release are available at https://downloads.haskell.org/~ghc/8.4.2 This release is a bug-fix release, fixing numerous regressions and bugs present in GHC 8.4.1. These include: * A regression resulting in some uses of `Control.Exception.evaluate` to be inappropriately optimised away (see #13930) * A regression resulting in segmentation faults of programs compiled with profiling (#14705) * A bug causing runtime system panics while running programs with retainer profiling (#14947) * The configure scripts now accepts a `--disable-dtrace` option, again allowing GHC to be bootstrapped on FreeBSD (#15040) * The version number of the `base` package has been bumped to 4.11.1.0 to reflect the addition of the `GHC.IO.FixIOException` type. This interface was added in 8.4.1 but the version bump was missed due to an oversight. * Support for DWARF debug information has been significantly improved (#14894, #14779) A more thorough list of the changes in this release can be found in the release notes, https://downloads.haskell.org/~ghc/8.4.2/docs/html/users_guide/8.4.2-notes.h... Thanks to everyone who has contributed to developing, documenting, and testing this release! As always, let us know if you encounter trouble. 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. GHC is a state-of-the-art programming suite for Haskell. Included is an optimising compiler generating efficient 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. 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://ghc.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://ghc.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://ghc.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://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/ Mailing lists ~~~~~~~~~~~~~ We run mailing lists for GHC users and bug reports; to subscribe, use the web interfaces at http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/glasgow-haskell-users http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ghc-tickets There are several other haskell and ghc-related mailing lists on www.haskell.org; for the full list, see https://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/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