GHC 8.6.3 released

Ben Gamari - 2018-12-08

The GHC team is very happy to announce the availability of GHC 8.6.3, a bugfix release in the GHC 8.6 series. The source distribution, binary distributions, and documentation for this release are available.

The 8.6 release fixes several regressions present in 8.6.2 including:

• A code generation bug resulting in segmentations faults in some programs (#15892)

• Darwin binary distributions are now correctly built against an in-tree GMP (#15404)

• Three bugs leading to linker failures on Windows (#15105, #15894, #15934)

• A bug leading to programs with deep stacks crashing when run with retainer profiling enabled (#14758)

• A bug resulting in potential heap corruption during stable name allocation (#15906)

• Plugins are now loaded during GHCi sessions (#15633)

As a few of these issues are rather serious users are strongly encouraged to upgrade. See Trac for a full list of issues resolved in this release.

Note that this release ships with one significant but long-standing bug (#14251): Calls to functions taking both Float# and Double# may result in incorrect code generation when compiled using the LLVM code generator. This is not a new issue, it has existed as long as the LLVM code generator has existed; however, changes in code generation in 8.6 made it more likely that user code using only lifted types will trigger it.

Happy compiling!