Thanks a lot, Ben and devs, for all the hard work!
Would it be possible to mention the JS and WASM backends in the release
notes? Is it a simple oversight that there are not there, or you want to
wait until a release where they are more mature?
--
Best, Artem
On Mon, Jan 30, 2023, 1:22 PM Ben Gamari
The GHC team is very pleased to announce the availability of GHC 9.6.1-alpha2. As usual, binaries and source distributions are available at downloads.haskell.org:
https://downloads.haskell.org/ghc/9.6.1-alpha2/
Beginning with GHC 9.6.1, GHC can be built as a cross-compiler to WebAssembly and JavaScript. This is an important step towards robust support for compiling Haskell to the Web, but there are a few caveats to be aware of in the 9.6 series:
- Both the Javascript and WebAssembly backends are still at an early stage of development and are present in this release as a technology preview
- Using GHC as a cross-compiler is not as easy as we would like it to be; in particular, there are challenges related to Template Haskell.
- GHC is not yet run-time retargetable; a given GHC binary targets exactly one platform, and both WebAssembly and JavaScript are considered platforms for this purpose. Cross-compilers must be built from source by their users
We hope to lift all of these limitations in future releases.
Additionally, 9.6.1 will include:
- Significant latency improvements in the non-moving garbage collector
- Efficient runtime support for delimited continuations
- Improvements in compiler error messages
- Numerous improvements in the compiler's memory usage
See the [release notes] for a comprehensive accounting of changes in this release.
As always, one can find a [migration guide] to aid in transitioning from older releases on the GHC Wiki. We have also recently started extending our release process to cover a wider set of Linux distributions. In particular, we now offer Rocky 8 and Ubuntu 20.04 binary distributions which cover RedHat-derivative and distributions using older `glibc` releases (namely 2.27), respectively.
Please do give this release a try and open a [ticket] if you see anything amiss.
Cheers,
- Ben
[ticket]: https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/issues/ [migration-guide]: https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/-/wikis/migration/9.6 [release notes]: https://downloads.haskell.org/ghc/9.6.1-alpha2/docs/users_guide/9.6.1-notes.... _______________________________________________ Glasgow-haskell-users mailing list Glasgow-haskell-users@haskell.org http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/glasgow-haskell-users