Hi all, I am happy to announce that we are almost upon the 0.8.0 release of jhc, which has quite a few changes from the past so I was hoping I could get some people to help test the newest darcs tree and give feedback. changes include. - A brand new library descriptor file format. Now it is a true YAML file. no more of the confusing quasi-cabal files that were not well defined. - the library description files now can affect pretty much any aspect of compilation, so it is much easier to make a self-contained build or for tools like configure/cabal to interface to jhc. They just need to spit out an appropirate yaml file rather than care about passing the right options to jhc in addition to creating a description file. - jhc transparently handles '.hsc' files (assuming you have hsc2hs installed). It even does the right thing when cross compiliing! using the target architectures types rather than the hosts. - the primtive libraries have been re-done, now there is a truely absolutely minimal jhc-prim library that is everything that must exist for jhc to work. everything else and i mean everything is implemented in normal haskell code. Want to create a varient of haskell that has 16 bit ints, ASCII 8 bit Chars and pervasively uses null terminated C style strings? just create a base-tiny library and link it against jhc-prim. - the standalone deriving extension has been implemented, this greatly improves the ability to re-arrange the libraries logically. - support the LANGUAGE pragma and the equivalant field in the library description files with ghc-compatibility. (ghc extensions are mapped to the closest matching jhc flags.) Things I am still working on but want for the release: - C code and header files will be wrapped up into the .hl file as part of a library build. so there is no need to coordinate native code and jhc libraries, installing a library will always be as simple as dropping an hl file in your library directory. (notably, this will allow transparent distribution of 'bytestring' which has C components) - full haskell 2010 compliance, getting closer, rewrote a lot of libraries, still some work to go. - newtype deriving, sort of hacky and unchecked right now but oh so very useful. What I can use help with: - documentation, anything obvious missing, out of date? - external libraries. in the lib/ext directory I have a few. I'd like to expand it and keep track of what people want. I'd like some better automated way to handle these libraries so they need not be integrated with the main darcs tree. probably post 0.8.0. - many error messages produced by jhc are inscrutable. I'd like to start keeping track of the most eggregious ones and working on fixes. John