============================================================= The (Interactive) Glasgow Haskell Compiler -- version 6.4 ============================================================= The GHC Team is delighted to announce a new major release of GHC. It has been a long time since the last major release (Dec 2003!), and a lot has happened: - GADTs (Generalised Abstract Datatypes) are supported - STM (Software Transactional Memory) is implemented - Full support for Cabal and a much improved package framework - Better support for mutually-recursive modules - A complete rewrite of the back end - Accurate source locations in error messages - Lots of new libraries The full release notes are here: http://haskell.org/ghc/docs/6.4/html/users_guide/release-6-4.html How to get it ~~~~~~~~~~~~~ If you haven't already done so, please fill in the GHC Survey: http://www.haskell.org/ghc/survey/start.cgi We'll use the information you give us to improve future releases of GHC. The easy way to get GHC is to go to the WWW page, which should be self-explanatory: http://www.haskell.org/ghc/ Binary packages will become available as they are built - if the package for your system isn't available yet, please try again later. We supply binary builds in the native package format for various flavours of Linux and BSD, and in Windows Installer (MSI) form for Windows folks. Binary builds for other platforms are available as a .tar.gz which can be installed wherever you want. The source distribution is also available from the same place. 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/ Haskell home page http://www.haskell.org/ comp.lang.functional FAQ http://www.cs.nott.ac.uk/~gmh/faq.html System requirements ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ To compile programs with GHC, you need a machine with 64+MB memory, GCC and perl. This release is known to work on the following platforms: * i386-unknown-{linux,*bsd,mingw32} * x86_64-unknown-linux * powerpc-apple-darwin (MacOS X) * powerpc-apple-linux * sparc-sun-solaris2 (may have bitrotted due to lack of attention) Ports to other platforms are possible with varying degrees of difficulty. The builder's guide on the web site gives a complete run-down of what ports work and how to go about porting to a new platform; it can be found at http://www.haskell.org/ghc/docs/latest/html/building/building-guide.html 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/ Please report bugs using our SourceForge page at http://sourceforge.net/projects/ghc/ or send them to glasgow-haskell-bugs@haskell.org. GHC users hang out on glasgow-haskell-users@haskell.org. Bleeding edge CVS users party on cvs-ghc@haskell.org.