GHC 8.0.2 is available!

bgamari - 2017-01-11

The GHC team is happy to at last announce the 8.0.2 release of the Glasgow Haskell Compiler. Source and binary distributions are available at

http://downloads.haskell.org/~ghc/8.0.2/

This is the second release of the 8.0 series and fixes nearly two-hundred bugs. These include,

  • Interface file build determinism (#4012).

  • Compatibility with macOS Sierra and GCC compilers which compile position-independent executables by default

  • Compatibility with systems which use the gold linker

  • Runtime linker fixes on Windows (see #12797)

  • A compiler bug which resulted in undefined reference errors while compiling some packages (see #12076)

  • A number of memory consistency bugs in the runtime system

  • A number of efficiency issues in the threaded runtime which manifest on larger core counts and large numbers of bound threads.

  • A typechecker bug which caused some programs using -XDefaultSignatures to be incorrectly accepted.

  • More than two-hundred other bugs. See Trac for a complete listing.

  • #12757, which lead to broken runtime behavior and even crashes in the presence of primitive strings.

  • #12844, a type inference issue affecting partial type signatures.

  • A bump of the directory library, fixing buggy path canonicalization behavior (#12894). Unfortunately this required a major version bump in directory and minor bumps in several other libraries.

  • #12912, where use of the select system call would lead to runtime system failures with large numbers of open file handles.

  • #10635, wherein -Wredundant-constraints was included in the -Wall warning set

A more detailed list of the changes included in this release can be found in the release notes.

Please note that this release breaks with our usual tendency to avoid major version bumps of core libraries in minor GHC releases by including an upgrade of the directory library to 1.3.0.0.

Also note that, due to a rather serious bug (#13100) affecting Windows noticed late in the release cycle, the Windows binary distributions were produced using a slightly patched source tree. Users compiling from source for Windows should be certain to include this patch in their build.

This release is the result of six months of effort by the GHC development community. We’d like to thank everyone who has contributed code, bug reports, and feedback to this release. It’s only due to their efforts that GHC remains a vibrant and exciting project.

How to get it

Both the source tarball and binary distributions for a wide variety of platforms are available here.

Background

Haskell is a standardized lazy functional programming language.

The Glasgow Haskell Compiler (GHC) is a state-of-the-art programming suite for Haskell. Included is an optimising compiler generating efficient 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. GHC is distributed under a BSD-style open source license.

Supported Platforms

The list of platforms we support, and the people responsible for them, can be found on the GHC wiki

Ports to other platforms are possible with varying degrees of difficulty. The Building Guide describes how to go about porting to a new platform.

Developers

We welcome new contributors. Instructions on getting started with hacking on GHC are available from GHC’s developer site.

Community Resources

There are mailing lists for GHC users, develpoers, and monitoring bug tracker activity; to subscribe, use the Mailman web interface.

There are several other Haskell and GHC-related mailing lists on haskell.org; for the full list, see the lists page.

Some GHC developers hang out on the #ghc and #haskell of the Freenode IRC network, too. See the Haskell wiki for details.

Please report bugs using our bug tracking system. Instructions on reporting bugs can be found here.