[ANNOUNCE] GHC 8.0.1 release candidate 2

Hello everyone, The GHC Team is very pleased to announce the second release candidate of the Glasgow Haskell Compiler 8.0.1 release. Source and binary distributions as well as the newly revised users guide and Haddock documentation can be found at http://downloads.haskell.org/~ghc/8.0.1-rc2/ This is the second in a series of release candidates leading up to the 8.0.1 release and fixes many of the issues reported in -rc1. These fixes include, * A re-rewrite of the pattern checker by George Karachalias. The new checker should have far more predictable performance characteristics while sacrificing minimal reasoning power. This should resolve a large number of the issues felt in -rc1. * Richard Eisenberg has been hammering out all manner of type-application- and TypeInType-related issues (#11335, #11416, #11405). There is still more work to do here, however (e.g. #11471). * Matthew Pickering has restored support for multi-clause pattern synonyms (#11367) * A latent bug in the constraint solver which popped up as a build failure in xmonad-contrib in -rc1 has been fixed (#11379) * Dimitrios Vytiniotis and Simon Peyton Jones has been squashing a variety of older type-checker bugs at a furious rate (#11458, #11248, #11330, #11408) * Simon Peyton Jones has taught demand analysis to more precisely handle exceptions (#11222) * Tamar Christina has added support for remote GHCi on Windows and resolved a long-standing linking issue (#11223) * Loading of compiled modules needing shared library symbols now works in GHCi thanks to Peter Trommler (#10458) * A variety of limitations in our implementation of Typeable implementation have been fixed (#11120) although there is still more to be done (#11334). * A terrible failure of type inference due to visible type application has been fixed (#11458) * InjectiveTypeFamilies has been renamed to TypeFamilyDependencies * Custom type errors are now more robust (#11391) although there is still more work to be done (#11541) * We now have a more conservative default warning set, as well as better mechanisms for managing warning changes in the future. (#11429, #11370) * Compatibility with earlier Cabal versions should be a bit more robust. * The user-facing interface of the (formerly "implicit") CallStack functionality has been reworked, hiding the implicit callstack parameter behind a constraint synonym. * Online haddock documentation has been restored (#11419) * We now offer xz archives exclusively * A variety of miscellaneous bug-fixes have also been merged. All of these changes add up to nearly 200 commits in total. Given the large amount of churn between this candidate and -rc1, as well as the fact that there is at least one more significant patch pending (D1891, to fix #11471 and others), we will be releasing a third release candidate in a few weeks which should address more of the issues listed on the release status page [1]. Assuming things go well, we should be able to cut a final release by early March at the latest. All of the builds above were produced from the ghc-8.0.1-rc2 tag (commit e2230228906a1c0fa1f86a0c1aa18d87de3cc49d) *with the exception of the Windows builds*. Unfortunately, it was realized only too late that the tagged commit is broken on Windows. Consequently, the Windows builds were produced from the ghc-8.0.1-rc2 tag with two additional patches (commit 5b35c5509adb1311856faa0bc9767aec9ad5e9b7). While this would of course be completely unacceptable for a proper release, time constraints have meant that this was unfortunately the only viable option for this release candidate. We apologize for any confusion this may cause. At this point we are working very hard to nail the remaining bugs labelled as "highest" priority on the 8.0.1 status page [1]. If you have an issue which you'd like to see addressed in the release that does not appear in this list, please bring it to our attention. As always, we look forward to hearing about any issues that you encounter with this candidate. Thanks to everyone who has contributed so far! Cheers, - Ben [1] https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Status/GHC-8.0.1 -------------- next part -------------- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: signature.asc Type: application/pgp-signature Size: 472 bytes Desc: not available URL: <http://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/attachments/20160207/3ac2114a/attachment.sig>