============================================================== The (Interactive) Glasgow Haskell Compiler -- version 7.8.1 ============================================================== The GHC Team is pleased to announce a new major release of GHC. There have been a number of significant changes since the last major release, including: * New type-system features * Closed type families * Role checking * An improved solver for type naturals * Better support for cross compilation * Full iOS support * Massive scalability improvements to the I/O manager * Dynamic linking for GHCi * Several language improvements * Pattern synonyms * Overloaded list syntax * Kind-polymorphic 'Typeable' class * A new parallel --make mode * Preliminary SIMD intrinsic support * A brand-new low level code generator * Many bugfixes and other performance improvements. The full release notes are here: http://haskell.org/ghc/docs/7.8.1/html/users_guide/release-7-8-1.html 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 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/ 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/TeamGHC 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://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/ 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 Hashes & Signatures ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ Included in this email is a signed copy of the SHA256 hashes for the tarballs, using my GPG key (keyid 0x3B58D86F). -- Regards, Austin Seipp, Haskell Consultant Well-Typed LLP, http://www.well-typed.com/