This announcement will only be of interest to Haskell programmers using, or thinking of using, Template Haskell. I am very pleased to announce a new release (2009.6.23.3) of ZeroTH (also known as zeroth), a tool for preprocessing Haskell code to run splices and remove Template Haskell dependencies: http://hackage.haskell.org/package/zeroth For example, you could use it to reduce the size of your Haskell program binaries, if you use Template Haskell. (zeroth now actually uses itself on itself, for this very purpose, and you can use the Distribution.ZeroTH module for that in your own cabal projects.) It's still very much a hack - in that it would probably be more efficient and clean to implement it as an option to GHC - but hopefully now at least it's a slightly *better* hack. Lemmih has kindly agreed to hand over the job of being maintainer of ZeroTH to me. So please send any patches or complaints my way. The new darcs repository for the project, which is a darcs 2 repository, is at: http://patch-tag.com/publicrepos/zerothDarcs2 For this release, the "cabal" command-line tool is the only officially supported means of installation. So you should do something like: cabal update cabal install zeroth to install it. To get a summary of command-line options, type: zeroth --help Major changes from previous releases: * Much more Haskell code is now supported. This is partly because the code has been updated to work with the just-released haskell-src-exts 1.0.0; and partly because it supports a wider variety of Template Haskell code, including code which refers to definitions declared in the same source file. * It is now compulsory to specify any Haskell language extensions you are using in the input file, with a LANGUAGE pragma. (For debugging purposes, zeroth prints to stderr the result of parsing the LANGUAGE pragma, if any. If haskell-src-exts doesn't understand the LANGUAGE pragma, this will be Nothing. But that shouldn't happen.) * Template Haskell imports are now *automatically* stripped by default by zeroth, and so cpphs doesn't need to be run if you aren't otherwise using CPP. * New command-line options have been added (see zeroth --help). * Error messages are now more informative. * Librification! Almost anything can benefit from being made into a library, and zeroth is no exception. Of course, the executable is still there. * You can still use it on certain code which doesn't compile in GHC (yes, really, I've tested this!) but you now have to use the --only-splices option if you want to do this. Obviously, the splices themselves have to compile. --only-splices also makes zeroth faster. It is very lightly tested, so it might not work for your code out of the box. Please let me know if you have any problems with it, no matter how small. Happy hacking, -- Robin