The GHC developers are very pleased to announce the availability of the first alpha prerelease of GHC 9.8.1. Binary distributions, source distributions, and documentation are available at https://downloads.haskell.org/ghc/9.8.1-alpha1 GHC 9.8 will bring a number of new features and improvements, including: * Preliminary support the `TypeApplications` language extension [type-binders], allowing types to be bound in type declarations. * Support for the `ExtendedLiterals` extension, providing syntax for non-word-sized numeric literals in the surface language [extended-literals] * Improved rewrite rule matching behavior, allowing limited matching of higher-order patterns * Better support for user-defined warnings by way of the `WARNING` pragma [warnings] * The introduction of the new `GHC.TypeError.Unsatisfiable` constraint, allowing more predictable user-defined type errors [unsatisfiable] * Implementation of the export deprecation proposal, allowing module exports to be marked with `DEPRECATE` pragmas [deprecated-exports] * The addition of build semaphore support for parallel compilation; with coming support in `cabal-install` this will allow better use of parallelism in multi-package builds [jsem] * More efficient representation of info table provenance information, reducing binary sizes by over 50% in some cases when `-finfo-table-map` is in use A full accounting of changes can be found in the [release notes]. We would like to thank GitHub, IOG, the Zw3rk stake pool, Well-Typed, Tweag I/O, Serokell, Equinix, SimSpace, the Haskell Foundation, and other anonymous contributors whose on-going financial and in-kind support has facilitated GHC maintenance and release management over the years. Finally, this release would not have been possible without the hundreds of open-source contributors whose work comprise this release. As always, do give this release a try and open a [ticket] if you see anything amiss. Happy compiling, ~ Ben [type-binders]: https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals/blob/master/proposals/0425-de... [extended-literals]: https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals/blob/master/proposals/0451-si... [unsatisfiable]: https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals/blob/master/proposals/0433-un... [warnings]: https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals/blob/master/proposals/0541-wa... [deprecated-exports]: https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals/blob/master/proposals/0134-de... [jsem]: https://github.com/ghc-proposals/ghc-proposals/blob/master/proposals/0540-js... [release notes]: https://downloads.haskell.org/ghc/9.8.1-alpha1/docs/users_guide/9.8.1-notes.... [ticket]: https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/ghc/-/issues/new