Hello everyone, The GHC team is pleased to announce the first alpha release of GHC 8.8.1. The source distribution, binary distributions, and documentation are available at https://downloads.haskell.org/~ghc/8.8.1-alpha1 A draft of the release notes is also available [1]. This release is the culmination of over 3000 commits by over one hundred contributors and has several new features and numerous bug fixes relative to GHC 8.6: * Profiling now works correctly on 64-bit Windows (although still may be problematic on 32-bit Windows due to platform limitations; see #15934) * A new code layout algorithm for amd64's native code generator * The introduction of a late lambda-lifting pass which may reduce allocations significantly for some programs. * Further work on Trees That Grow, enabling improved code re-use of the Haskell AST in tooling * More locations where users can write `forall` (GHC Proposal #0007) * Further work on the Hadrian build system This release starts the pre-release cycle for GHC 8.8. This cycle is starting quite a bit later than expected due recent work on GHC's CI and release infrastructure. See the GHC Blog [2] for more on this. As always, if anything looks amiss do let us know. Happy compiling! Cheers, - Ben [1] https://downloads.haskell.org/ghc/8.8.1-alpha1/docs/html/users_guide/8.8.1-n... [2] https://www.haskell.org/ghc/blog/20190405-ghc-8.8-status.html