GHC 8.4.2 released

Ben Gamari - 2018-04-20

The GHC team is pleased to announce the availability of GHC 8.4.2. The source distribution, binary distributions, and documentation for this release are available at

https://downloads.haskell.org/~ghc/8.4.2

This release is a bug-fix release, fixing numerous regressions and bugs present in GHC 8.4.1. These include:

  • A regression resulting in some uses of Control.Exception.evaluate to be inappropriately optimised away (see #13930)

  • A regression resulting in segmentation faults of programs compiled with profiling (#14705)

  • A bug causing runtime system panics while running programs with retainer profiling (#14947)

  • The configure scripts now accepts a --disable-dtrace option, again allowing GHC to be bootstrapped on FreeBSD (#15040)

  • The version number of the base package has been bumped to 4.11.1.0 to reflect the addition of the GHC.IO.FixIOException type. This interface was added in 8.4.1 but the version bump was missed due to an oversight.

  • Support for DWARF debug information has been significantly improved (#14894, #14779)

A more thorough list of the changes in this release can be found in the release notes,

https://downloads.haskell.org/~ghc/8.4.2/docs/html/users_guide/8.4.2-notes.html

Thanks to everyone who has contributed to developing, documenting, and testing this release!

As always, let us know if you encounter trouble.

How to get it

This release can be downloaded from

https://www.haskell.org/ghc/download_ghc_8_4_2.html

For older versions see

https://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.

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 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.

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:

Supported Platforms

The list of platforms we support, and the people responsible for them, is here

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 accessing our source code repository, and getting started with hacking on GHC, are available from the GHC’s developer’s site run by Trac.

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.