GHC

Hi *, It's been a few weeks since the last news bulletin - this is the result of mostly quietness on behalf of the list and developers, and some sickness on behalf of your editor for several days there. But now there's actually some things to ... [More] write here! The past few weeks, GHC HQ has been having some quiet meetings mostly about bugfixes for a 7.10.2 release - as well as noodling about compiler performance. Austin has begun compiling his preliminary notes on the wiki, under the CompilerPerformance page, where we'll be trying to keep track of the ongoing performance story. Hopefully, GHC 7.12.1 will boast a bit better performance numbers. There are a lot of users who are interested in this particular pain point, so please file tickets and CC yourself on bugs (like #10370), or feel free to help out! 7.10.2 status There's been a bit of chatter about the lists about something on many peoples mind: the release of GHC 7.10.2. Most prominently, Mark Lentczner popped in to ask when the next GHC release will happen - in particular, he'd like to make a Haskell Platform release in lockstep with it (see below for a link to Mark's email). Until recently, the actual desire for 7.10.2 wasn't totally clear, and at this point, GHC HQ hasn't firmly committed to the 7.10.2 release date. But if milestone:7.10.2 is any indicator, we've already closed over three dozen bugs, several of them high priority - and they keep coming in. So it seems likely people will want these fixes in their hands relatively soon. Just remember: if you need a fix for 7.10.2, or have a bug you need us to look at, please email the ghc-devs list, file a ticket, and get our attention! Just be sure to set the milestone to 7.10.2. List chatter Herbert Valerio Riedel opened an RFC about a regression in GHC 7.10 relating to the update to Unicode 7. Any input from users of international languages or unicode users would be appreciated! ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-May/008930.html Herbert Valerio Riedel also asked about a new C pre-processor implementation for GHC - but in particular, adopting the extant cpphs into the GHC codebase for this task itself. ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-May/008934.html Austin Seipp emailed ghc-devs about the HCAR report, for which the GHC entry is due May 17th! Developers should get their edits in quickly. ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-May/008939.html Joachim Breitner asks if the branchless implementation for our literal cases are worth it for their complexity. There were some interesting responses, including some remarks on the V8 JavaScript compiler. ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-April/008852.html Niklas Hambüchen announced that he's backported the recent lightweight stack-trace support in GHC HEAD to GHC 7.10 and GHC 7.8 - meaning that users of these stable release can have informative call stack traces, even without profiling! FP Complete was interested in this feature, so they'd probably love to hear user input. ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-April/008862.html David Terei has written up a proposal on reconciling the existence of Roles with Safe Haskell, which caused us a lot of problems during the 7.8 release cycle. In particular, concerning the ability to break module abstractions and requiring programmers to safeguard abstractions through careful use of roles - and David's written a proposal to address that. ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-April/008902.html Mark Lentczner started a thread about the 7.10.2 release schedule - because this time, he wants to do a concurrent Haskell Platform release! The thread ended up with a good amount of discussion concerning if 7.10.2 is even needed - but at this rate, it looks like it will ship sometime soon. ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-May/008904.html Mateusz Kowalczyk posted to ghc-devs hoping to get some help with a tricky, long-standing issue: #4012, which concerns the determinism of GHC binaries. It turns out GHC isn't entirely deterministic when it calculates package IDs, meaning things get really bad when you mix prebuilt binary packages for systems. This in particular has become a real problem for the Nix package manager and users of Haskell applications. Mateusz asks if anyone would be willing to help look into it - and a lot of people would appreciate the help! ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-May/008992.html Noteworthy commits Commit f2d1b7fcbbc55e33375a7321222a9f4ee189aa38 - Support unboxing for GADT product types. Commit 51af102e5c6c56e0987432aa5a21fe10e24090e9 - Better hints when RTS options are not available. Commit 524ddbdad5816f77b7b719cac0671eebd3473616 - Make sure GHC.List.last is memory-efficient. Commit a1275a762ec04c1159ae37199b1c8f998a5c5499 - Improve improvement in the constraint solver. Commit 4efa421327cf127ebefde59b2eece693e37dc3c6 - Permit empty closed type families. Commit 477f514f6ebcf783810da93e2191e4b6ea65559b - rts: add "-no-rtsopts-suggestions" option Commit cf7573b8207bbb17c58612f3345e0b17d74cfb58 - More accurate allocation stats for :set +s Commit c4e8097ea8dd6e43eae7aadd6bae7e13272ba74d - Bump base version to 4.8.2.0 Commit 0bbc2ac6dae9ce2838f23a75a6a989826c06f3f5 - Use the gold linker for aarch64/linux (#9673) Commit 1e8c9b81a819da8eb54405a029fc33a9f5220321 - Enable SMP and GHCi support for AArch64 Closed tickets #10293, #10273, #10021, #10209, #10255, #10326, #9745, #10314, #8928, #8743, #10182, #10281, #10325, #10297, #10292, #10304, #10260, #9204, #10121, #10329, #9920, #10308, #10234, #10356, #10351, #10364, #9564, #10306, #10108, #9581, #10369, #9673, #10288, #10260, #10363, #10315, #10389, #9929, #10384, #10382, #10400, #10256, #10254, #10277, #10299, #10268, #10269, #10280, #10312, #10209, #10109, #10321, #10285, #9895, #10395, #10263, #10293, #10210, #10302, #10206, #9858, #10045, and #9840. [Less]

Hi *, It's been a few weeks since the last news bulletin - this is the result of mostly quietness on behalf of the list and developers, and some sickness on behalf of your editor for several days there. But now there's actually some things to ... [More] write here! The past few weeks, GHC HQ has been having some quiet meetings mostly about bugfixes for a 7.10.2 release - as well as noodling about compiler performance. Austin has begun compiling his preliminary notes on the wiki, under the CompilerPerformance page, where we'll be trying to keep track of the ongoing performance story. Hopefully, GHC 7.12.1 will boast a bit better performance numbers. There are a lot of users who are interested in this particular pain point, so please file tickets and CC yourself on bugs (like #10370), or feel free to help out! 7.10.2 status There's been a bit of chatter about the lists about something on many peoples mind: the release of GHC 7.10.2. Most prominently, Mark Lentczner popped in to ask when the next GHC release will happen - in particular, he'd like to make a Haskell Platform release in lockstep with it (see below for a link to Mark's email). Until recently, the actual desire for 7.10.2 wasn't totally clear, and at this point, GHC HQ hasn't firmly committed to the 7.10.2 release date. But if milestone:7.10.2 is any indicator, we've already closed over three dozen bugs, several of them high priority - and they keep coming in. So it seems likely people will want these fixes in their hands relatively soon. Just remember: if you need a fix for 7.10.2, or have a bug you need us to look at, please email the ghc-devs list, file a ticket, and get our attention! Just be sure to set the milestone to 7.10.2. List chatter Herbert Valerio Riedel opened an RFC about a regression in GHC 7.10 relating to the update to Unicode 7. Any input from users of international languages or unicode users would be appreciated! ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-May/008930.html Herbert Valerio Riedel also asked about a new C pre-processor implementation for GHC - but in particular, adopting the extant cpphs into the GHC codebase for this task itself. ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-May/008934.html Austin Seipp emailed ghc-devs about the HCAR report, for which the GHC entry is due May 17th! Developers should get their edits in quickly. ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-May/008939.html Joachim Breitner asks if the branchless implementation for our literal cases are worth it for their complexity. There were some interesting responses, including some remarks on the V8 JavaScript compiler. ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-April/008852.html Niklas Hambüchen announced that he's backported the recent lightweight stack-trace support in GHC HEAD to GHC 7.10 and GHC 7.8 - meaning that users of these stable release can have informative call stack traces, even without profiling! FP Complete was interested in this feature, so they'd probably love to hear user input. ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-April/008862.html David Terei has written up a proposal on reconciling the existence of Roles with Safe Haskell, which caused us a lot of problems during the 7.8 release cycle. In particular, concerning the ability to break module abstractions and requiring programmers to safeguard abstractions through careful use of roles - and David's written a proposal to address that. ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-April/008902.html Mark Lentczner started a thread about the 7.10.2 release schedule - because this time, he wants to do a concurrent Haskell Platform release! The thread ended up with a good amount of discussion concerning if 7.10.2 is even needed - but at this rate, it looks like it will ship sometime soon. ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-May/008904.html Mateusz Kowalczyk posted to ghc-devs hoping to get some help with a tricky, long-standing issue: #4012, which concerns the determinism of GHC binaries. It turns out GHC isn't entirely deterministic when it calculates package IDs, meaning things get really bad when you mix prebuilt binary packages for systems. This in particular has become a real problem for the Nix package manager and users of Haskell applications. Mateusz asks if anyone would be willing to help look into it - and a lot of people would appreciate the help! ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-May/008992.html Noteworthy commits Commit f2d1b7fcbbc55e33375a7321222a9f4ee189aa38 - Support unboxing for GADT product types. Commit 51af102e5c6c56e0987432aa5a21fe10e24090e9 - Better hints when RTS options are not available. Commit 524ddbdad5816f77b7b719cac0671eebd3473616 - Make sure GHC.List.last is memory-efficient. Commit a1275a762ec04c1159ae37199b1c8f998a5c5499 - Improve improvement in the constraint solver. Commit 4efa421327cf127ebefde59b2eece693e37dc3c6 - Permit empty closed type families. Commit 477f514f6ebcf783810da93e2191e4b6ea65559b - rts: add "-no-rtsopts-suggestions" option Commit cf7573b8207bbb17c58612f3345e0b17d74cfb58 - More accurate allocation stats for :set +s Commit c4e8097ea8dd6e43eae7aadd6bae7e13272ba74d - Bump base version to 4.8.2.0 Commit 0bbc2ac6dae9ce2838f23a75a6a989826c06f3f5 - Use the gold linker for aarch64/linux (#9673) Commit 1e8c9b81a819da8eb54405a029fc33a9f5220321 - Enable SMP and GHCi support for AArch64 Closed tickets #10293, #10273, #10021, #10209, #10255, #10326, #9745, #10314, #8928, #8743, #10182, #10281, #10325, #10297, #10292, #10304, #10260, #9204, #10121, #10329, #9920, #10308, #10234, #10356, #10351, #10364, #9564, #10306, #10108, #9581, #10369, #9673, #10288, #10260, #10363, #10315, #10389, #9929, #10384, #10382, #10400, #10256, #10254, #10277, #10299, #10268, #10269, #10280, #10312, #10209, #10109, #10321, #10285, #9895, #10395, #10263, #10293, #10210, #10302, #10206, #9858, #10045, and #9840. [Less]

Hi *, It's been a few weeks since the last news bulletin - this is the result of mostly quietness on behalf of the list and developers, and some sickness on behalf of your editor for several days there. But now there's actually some things to ... [More] write here! The past few weeks, GHC HQ has been having some quiet meetings mostly about bugfixes for a 7.10.2 release - as well as noodling about compiler performance. Austin has begun compiling his preliminary notes on the wiki, under the CompilerPerformance page, where we'll be trying to keep track of the ongoing performance story. Hopefully, GHC 7.12.1 will boast a bit better performance numbers. There are a lot of users who are interested in this particular pain point, so please file tickets and CC yourself on bugs (like #10370), or feel free to help out! 7.10.2 status There's been a bit of chatter about the lists about something on many peoples mind: the release of GHC 7.10.2. Most prominently, Mark Lentczner popped in to ask when the next GHC release will happen - in particular, he'd like to make a Haskell Platform release in lockstep with it (see below for a link to Mark's email). Until recently, the actual desire for 7.10.2 wasn't totally clear, and at this point, GHC HQ hasn't firmly committed to the 7.10.2 release date. But if milestone:7.10.2 is any indicator, we've already closed over three dozen bugs, several of them high priority - and they keep coming in. So it seems likely people will want these fixes in their hands relatively soon. Just remember: if you need a fix for 7.10.2, or have a bug you need us to look at, please email the ghc-devs list, file a ticket, and get our attention! Just be sure to set the milestone to 7.10.2. List chatter Herbert Valerio Riedel opened an RFC about a regression in GHC 7.10 relating to the update to Unicode 7. Any input from users of international languages or unicode users would be appreciated! ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-May/008930.html Herbert Valerio Riedel also asked about a new C pre-processor implementation for GHC - but in particular, adopting the extant cpphs into the GHC codebase for this task itself. ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-May/008934.html Austin Seipp emailed ghc-devs about the HCAR report, for which the GHC entry is due May 17th! Developers should get their edits in quickly. ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-May/008939.html Joachim Breitner asks if the branchless implementation for our literal cases are worth it for their complexity. There were some interesting responses, including some remarks on the V8 JavaScript compiler. ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-April/008852.html Niklas Hambüchen announced that he's backported the recent lightweight stack-trace support in GHC HEAD to GHC 7.10 and GHC 7.8 - meaning that users of these stable release can have informative call stack traces, even without profiling! FP Complete was interested in this feature, so they'd probably love to hear user input. ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-April/008862.html David Terei has written up a proposal on reconciling the existence of Roles with Safe Haskell, which caused us a lot of problems during the 7.8 release cycle. In particular, concerning the ability to break module abstractions and requiring programmers to safeguard abstractions through careful use of roles - and David's written a proposal to address that. ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-April/008902.html Mark Lentczner started a thread about the 7.10.2 release schedule - because this time, he wants to do a concurrent Haskell Platform release! The thread ended up with a good amount of discussion concerning if 7.10.2 is even needed - but at this rate, it looks like it will ship sometime soon. ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-May/008904.html Mateusz Kowalczyk posted to ghc-devs hoping to get some help with a tricky, long-standing issue: #4012, which concerns the determinism of GHC binaries. It turns out GHC isn't entirely deterministic when it calculates package IDs, meaning things get really bad when you mix prebuilt binary packages for systems. This in particular has become a real problem for the Nix package manager and users of Haskell applications. Mateusz asks if anyone would be willing to help look into it - and a lot of people would appreciate the help! ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-May/008992.html Noteworthy commits Commit f2d1b7fcbbc55e33375a7321222a9f4ee189aa38 - Support unboxing for GADT product types. Commit 51af102e5c6c56e0987432aa5a21fe10e24090e9 - Better hints when RTS options are not available. Commit 524ddbdad5816f77b7b719cac0671eebd3473616 - Make sure GHC.List.last is memory-efficient. Commit a1275a762ec04c1159ae37199b1c8f998a5c5499 - Improve improvement in the constraint solver. Commit 4efa421327cf127ebefde59b2eece693e37dc3c6 - Permit empty closed type families. Commit 477f514f6ebcf783810da93e2191e4b6ea65559b - rts: add "-no-rtsopts-suggestions" option Commit cf7573b8207bbb17c58612f3345e0b17d74cfb58 - More accurate allocation stats for :set +s Commit c4e8097ea8dd6e43eae7aadd6bae7e13272ba74d - Bump base version to 4.8.2.0 Commit 0bbc2ac6dae9ce2838f23a75a6a989826c06f3f5 - Use the gold linker for aarch64/linux (#9673) Commit 1e8c9b81a819da8eb54405a029fc33a9f5220321 - Enable SMP and GHCi support for AArch64 Closed tickets #10293, #10273, #10021, #10209, #10255, #10326, #9745, #10314, #8928, #8743, #10182, #10281, #10325, #10297, #10292, #10304, #10260, #9204, #10121, #10329, #9920, #10308, #10234, #10356, #10351, #10364, #9564, #10306, #10108, #9581, #10369, #9673, #10288, #10260, #10363, #10315, #10389, #9929, #10384, #10382, #10400, #10256, #10254, #10277, #10299, #10268, #10269, #10280, #10312, #10209, #10109, #10321, #10285, #9895, #10395, #10263, #10293, #10210, #10302, #10206, #9858, #10045, and #9840. [Less]

Hi *, It's been a few weeks since the last news bulletin - this is the result of mostly quietness on behalf of the list and developers, and some sickness on behalf of your editor for several days there. But now there's actually some things to ... [More] write here! The past few weeks, GHC HQ has been having some quiet meetings mostly about bugfixes for a 7.10.2 release - as well as noodling about compiler performance. Austin has begun compiling his preliminary notes on the wiki, under the CompilerPerformance page, where we'll be trying to keep track of the ongoing performance story. Hopefully, GHC 7.12.1 will boast a bit better performance numbers. There are a lot of users who are interested in this particular pain point, so please file tickets and CC yourself on bugs (like #10370), or feel free to help out! 7.10.2 status There's been a bit of chatter about the lists about something on many peoples mind: the release of GHC 7.10.2. Most prominently, Mark Lentczner popped in to ask when the next GHC release will happen - in particular, he'd like to make a Haskell Platform release in lockstep with it (see below for a link to Mark's email). Until recently, the actual desire for 7.10.2 wasn't totally clear, and at this point, GHC HQ hasn't firmly committed to the 7.10.2 release date. But if milestone:7.10.2 is any indicator, we've already closed over three dozen bugs, several of them high priority - and they keep coming in. So it seems likely people will want these fixes in their hands relatively soon. Just remember: if you need a fix for 7.10.2, or have a bug you need us to look at, please email the ghc-devs list, file a ticket, and get our attention! Just be sure to set the milestone to 7.10.2. List chatter Herbert Valerio Riedel opened an RFC about a regression in GHC 7.10 relating to the update to Unicode 7. Any input from users of international languages or unicode users would be appreciated! ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-May/008930.html Herbert Valerio Riedel also asked about a new C pre-processor implementation for GHC - but in particular, adopting the extant cpphs into the GHC codebase for this task itself. ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-May/008934.html Austin Seipp emailed ghc-devs about the HCAR report, for which the GHC entry is due May 17th! Developers should get their edits in quickly. ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-May/008939.html Joachim Breitner asks if the branchless implementation for our literal cases are worth it for their complexity. There were some interesting responses, including some remarks on the V8 JavaScript compiler. ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-April/008852.html Niklas Hambüchen announced that he's backported the recent lightweight stack-trace support in GHC HEAD to GHC 7.10 and GHC 7.8 - meaning that users of these stable release can have informative call stack traces, even without profiling! FP Complete was interested in this feature, so they'd probably love to hear user input. ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-April/008862.html David Terei has written up a proposal on reconciling the existence of Roles with Safe Haskell, which caused us a lot of problems during the 7.8 release cycle. In particular, concerning the ability to break module abstractions and requiring programmers to safeguard abstractions through careful use of roles - and David's written a proposal to address that. ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-April/008902.html Mark Lentczner started a thread about the 7.10.2 release schedule - because this time, he wants to do a concurrent Haskell Platform release! The thread ended up with a good amount of discussion concerning if 7.10.2 is even needed - but at this rate, it looks like it will ship sometime soon. ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-May/008904.html Mateusz Kowalczyk posted to ghc-devs hoping to get some help with a tricky, long-standing issue: #4012, which concerns the determinism of GHC binaries. It turns out GHC isn't entirely deterministic when it calculates package IDs, meaning things get really bad when you mix prebuilt binary packages for systems. This in particular has become a real problem for the Nix package manager and users of Haskell applications. Mateusz asks if anyone would be willing to help look into it - and a lot of people would appreciate the help! ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-May/008992.html Noteworthy commits Commit f2d1b7fcbbc55e33375a7321222a9f4ee189aa38 - Support unboxing for GADT product types. Commit 51af102e5c6c56e0987432aa5a21fe10e24090e9 - Better hints when RTS options are not available. Commit 524ddbdad5816f77b7b719cac0671eebd3473616 - Make sure GHC.List.last is memory-efficient. Commit a1275a762ec04c1159ae37199b1c8f998a5c5499 - Improve improvement in the constraint solver. Commit 4efa421327cf127ebefde59b2eece693e37dc3c6 - Permit empty closed type families. Commit 477f514f6ebcf783810da93e2191e4b6ea65559b - rts: add "-no-rtsopts-suggestions" option Commit cf7573b8207bbb17c58612f3345e0b17d74cfb58 - More accurate allocation stats for :set +s Commit c4e8097ea8dd6e43eae7aadd6bae7e13272ba74d - Bump base version to 4.8.2.0 Commit 0bbc2ac6dae9ce2838f23a75a6a989826c06f3f5 - Use the gold linker for aarch64/linux (#9673) Commit 1e8c9b81a819da8eb54405a029fc33a9f5220321 - Enable SMP and GHCi support for AArch64 Closed tickets #10293, #10273, #10021, #10209, #10255, #10326, #9745, #10314, #8928, #8743, #10182, #10281, #10325, #10297, #10292, #10304, #10260, #9204, #10121, #10329, #9920, #10308, #10234, #10356, #10351, #10364, #9564, #10306, #10108, #9581, #10369, #9673, #10288, #10260, #10363, #10315, #10389, #9929, #10384, #10382, #10400, #10256, #10254, #10277, #10299, #10268, #10269, #10280, #10312, #10209, #10109, #10321, #10285, #9895, #10395, #10263, #10293, #10210, #10302, #10206, #9858, #10045, and #9840. [Less]

Hi *, It's been a few weeks since the last news bulletin - your editor apologizes about that. It's actually been a relatively slow few weeks here too, and busy-ness outside of GHC has attracted some of my attention. Despite that, GHC 7.10.1 was ... [More] released, a new HP alpha is out, and things are moving along smoothly. Now that the release is done, things are quitely moving along in HEAD - with people committing code with reckless abandon, of course. This week, GHC HQ met up, but it's been very light since the 7.10.1 release. Currently there isn't anything pushing us to do a 7.10.2 release at least for a few more weeks it looks like - but see below. We puzzled a bit about the release status of 7.10.2, and thought: it's only holding up people who are depending on it. So, who's depending on it, and what do they need fixed? See below for more. We also talked a bit about performance - it seems the compiler has been getting much slower over time since the 7.8.x release series, and it's time to reign it in. Austin will be spending his week investigating a bit of this, and the causes. 7.10.2 Status So, you may be wondering when the 7.10.2 release is. The trick is it happens when you tell us it should happen! So far, taking a look at milestone:7.10.2, we've fixed about half the bugs we currently have marked down to fix. But we're probably going to punt some of those - and we're not sure all the ones that are there should be. So this is a call: If you need something to be fixed during 7.10.2, please file a ticket, set the milestone, and alert us. The sooner the better, because it'll inform us as to when we should release. Emailing [email protected] is also a sure-fire way to get our attention. And remember: you can always find out the latest about the next release at the Status page (in this case, for 7.10.2) - ​https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Status/GHC-7.10.2 Call for help: DocBook to AsciiDoc The GHC team needs some help. A few months ago, we put out a poll to convert our DocBook-based manual to AsciiDoc. The poll had a mostly lukewarm reception, with the idea that it will A) make life easier for people who frequently modify the users guide, and B) make life easier for people who add things irregularly, as a lower barrier to entry. It looks like we still want to do this - but alas, many of us don't have time! So, we're asking the public: Is anyone willing to step up and help here? For example, it may be possible to get a long ways with just pandoc, but we need someone to finish it - and in return, we'll help along the way! List chatter Austin Seipp announced GHC 7.10.1. ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-March/008700.html Mark Lentczner announced an alpha Haskell Platform release. ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-March/008724.html David Macek announced MSYS2 packages for GHC on Windows, and also asked for some help with continuous windows building - Windows hackers should help out! ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-March/008735.html Jan Stolarek reports about increased memory usage with GHC 7.10.1. ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-April/008751.html Thomas Miedema chimed into a thread started by Karel Gardas about better parallelizing the GHC build - and hopefully we can get something good out of it. ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-April/008749.html Austin Seipp made a call for help on working on and improving the GHC homepage, and luckily Sergey Bushnyak answered the call and has helped out! ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-April/008762.html Ozgun Ataman kicked off a thread about slower compilation times, with some nasty numbers. It's becoming more clear compiler performance should be a priority for 7.12, and we've let some things slip away from us: ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-April/008766.html A GHC user, Dave, asked the list about some questions with Cross Compilation, as he's attempting to get GHC to work natively inside the Open Embedded build environment. Unfortunately, things haven't been going well so far, and any input from enterprising hackers is appreciated: ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-April/008774.html Dan Aloni has started a discussion about improving GHC's error messages, spurred by a popular blog post he wrote and posted on Reddit about some Happy/GHC improvements he's made. This is a difficult area (error messages in general are hard) to work on, so thanks to Dan for helping! ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-April/008778.html Simon Peyton Jones started a discussion about GeneralizedNewtypeDeriving and Safe Haskell, in particular, whatever the current status, our documentation doesn't accurately reflect it! Perhaps someone could help out writing the documentation based on the current status quo? ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-April/008783.html Tamar Christina started a thread about replacing ghc-split, an old Perl script inside GHC, but he wanted to know: what do we do about a regex replacement? Mikhail Glushenkov spoke up about a similar decision the LLVM developers used: to use the OpenBSD regex implementation. ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-April/008785.html Alan Zimmerman has posted several questions and threads about the parser and the status of API annotations, which he's been furiously working on now that GHC 7.10 is being used on Hackage. Interested onlookers could learn a thing or two! ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-April/008782.html & ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-April/008787.html & ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-April/008794.html Gabor Greif has a question about some seemingly strange behavior regarding the interaction between poly-kinded data types and overlapping instances. Richard sez: this behavior is expected. ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-April/008804.html Noteworthy commits Commit de1160be047790afde4ec76de0a81ba3be0c73fa - refactor the story around switch cases (with a code-size improvement) Commit 995e8c1c8692b60c907c7d2ccea179d52ca8e69e - drop old integer-gmp-0.5 source code. Commit 59f7a7b6091e9c0564f3f370d09398d8c9cd8ad5 - Restore unwind information generation (fixes DWARF generation) Commit 9f0f99fd41ff82cc223d3b682703e508efb564d2 - Fix an old bug in the demand analyzer (with some nice compiler performance boosts). Commit a7524eaed33324e2155c47d4a705bef1d70a2b5b - Support for multiple signature files in scope (Backpack). Closed tickets #10222, #10219, #8057, #10226, #10220, #9723, #10230, #10208, #10236, #10213, #10231, #10240, #10243, #10237, #10224, #8811, #10197, #10252, #9958, #10253, #8248, #10207, #10214, #9964, #10194, #10251, #10188, #10257, #10247, #10247, #9160, #10259, #9965, #10265, #10264, #10286, #10282, #10290, #10291, #10300, #9929, #8276, #10218, #10148, #10232, #10274, #10275, #10195, and #10233. [Less]

Hi *, It's been a few weeks since the last news bulletin - your editor apologizes about that. It's actually been a relatively slow few weeks here too, and busy-ness outside of GHC has attracted some of my attention. Despite that, GHC 7.10.1 was ... [More] released, a new HP alpha is out, and things are moving along smoothly. Now that the release is done, things are quitely moving along in HEAD - with people committing code with reckless abandon, of course. This week, GHC HQ met up, but it's been very light since the 7.10.1 release. Currently there isn't anything pushing us to do a 7.10.2 release at least for a few more weeks it looks like - but see below. We puzzled a bit about the release status of 7.10.2, and thought: it's only holding up people who are depending on it. So, who's depending on it, and what do they need fixed? See below for more. We also talked a bit about performance - it seems the compiler has been getting much slower over time since the 7.8.x release series, and it's time to reign it in. Austin will be spending his week investigating a bit of this, and the causes. 7.10.2 Status So, you may be wondering when the 7.10.2 release is. The trick is it happens when you tell us it should happen! So far, taking a look at milestone:7.10.2, we've fixed about half the bugs we currently have marked down to fix. But we're probably going to punt some of those - and we're not sure all the ones that are there should be. So this is a call: If you need something to be fixed during 7.10.2, please file a ticket, set the milestone, and alert us. The sooner the better, because it'll inform us as to when we should release. Emailing [email protected] is also a sure-fire way to get our attention. And remember: you can always find out the latest about the next release at the Status page (in this case, for 7.10.2) - ​https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Status/GHC-7.10.2 Call for help: DocBook to AsciiDoc The GHC team needs some help. A few months ago, we put out a poll to convert our DocBook-based manual to AsciiDoc. The poll had a mostly lukewarm reception, with the idea that it will A) make life easier for people who frequently modify the users guide, and B) make life easier for people who add things irregularly, as a lower barrier to entry. It looks like we still want to do this - but alas, many of us don't have time! So, we're asking the public: Is anyone willing to step up and help here? For example, it may be possible to get a long ways with just pandoc, but we need someone to finish it - and in return, we'll help along the way! List chatter Austin Seipp announced GHC 7.10.1. ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-March/008700.html Mark Lentczner announced an alpha Haskell Platform release. ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-March/008724.html David Macek announced MSYS2 packages for GHC on Windows, and also asked for some help with continuous windows building - Windows hackers should help out! ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-March/008735.html Jan Stolarek reports about increased memory usage with GHC 7.10.1. ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-April/008751.html Thomas Miedema chimed into a thread started by Karel Gardas about better parallelizing the GHC build - and hopefully we can get something good out of it. ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-April/008749.html Austin Seipp made a call for help on working on and improving the GHC homepage, and luckily Sergey Bushnyak answered the call and has helped out! ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-April/008762.html Ozgun Ataman kicked off a thread about slower compilation times, with some nasty numbers. It's becoming more clear compiler performance should be a priority for 7.12, and we've let some things slip away from us: ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-April/008766.html A GHC user, Dave, asked the list about some questions with Cross Compilation, as he's attempting to get GHC to work natively inside the Open Embedded build environment. Unfortunately, things haven't been going well so far, and any input from enterprising hackers is appreciated: ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-April/008774.html Dan Aloni has started a discussion about improving GHC's error messages, spurred by a popular blog post he wrote and posted on Reddit about some Happy/GHC improvements he's made. This is a difficult area (error messages in general are hard) to work on, so thanks to Dan for helping! ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-April/008778.html Simon Peyton Jones started a discussion about GeneralizedNewtypeDeriving and Safe Haskell, in particular, whatever the current status, our documentation doesn't accurately reflect it! Perhaps someone could help out writing the documentation based on the current status quo? ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-April/008783.html Tamar Christina started a thread about replacing ghc-split, an old Perl script inside GHC, but he wanted to know: what do we do about a regex replacement? Mikhail Glushenkov spoke up about a similar decision the LLVM developers used: to use the OpenBSD regex implementation. ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-April/008785.html Alan Zimmerman has posted several questions and threads about the parser and the status of API annotations, which he's been furiously working on now that GHC 7.10 is being used on Hackage. Interested onlookers could learn a thing or two! ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-April/008782.html & ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-April/008787.html & ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-April/008794.html Gabor Greif has a question about some seemingly strange behavior regarding the interaction between poly-kinded data types and overlapping instances. Richard sez: this behavior is expected. ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-April/008804.html Noteworthy commits Commit de1160be047790afde4ec76de0a81ba3be0c73fa - refactor the story around switch cases (with a code-size improvement) Commit 995e8c1c8692b60c907c7d2ccea179d52ca8e69e - drop old integer-gmp-0.5 source code. Commit 59f7a7b6091e9c0564f3f370d09398d8c9cd8ad5 - Restore unwind information generation (fixes DWARF generation) Commit 9f0f99fd41ff82cc223d3b682703e508efb564d2 - Fix an old bug in the demand analyzer (with some nice compiler performance boosts). Commit a7524eaed33324e2155c47d4a705bef1d70a2b5b - Support for multiple signature files in scope (Backpack). Closed tickets #10222, #10219, #8057, #10226, #10220, #9723, #10230, #10208, #10236, #10213, #10231, #10240, #10243, #10237, #10224, #8811, #10197, #10252, #9958, #10253, #8248, #10207, #10214, #9964, #10194, #10251, #10188, #10257, #10247, #10247, #9160, #10259, #9965, #10265, #10264, #10286, #10282, #10290, #10291, #10300, #9929, #8276, #10218, #10148, #10232, #10274, #10275, #10195, and #10233. [Less]

Hi *, It's been a few weeks since the last news bulletin - your editor apologizes about that. It's actually been a relatively slow few weeks here too, and busy-ness outside of GHC has attracted some of my attention. Despite that, GHC 7.10.1 was ... [More] released, a new HP alpha is out, and things are moving along smoothly. Now that the release is done, things are quitely moving along in HEAD - with people committing code with reckless abandon, of course. This week, GHC HQ met up, but it's been very light since the 7.10.1 release. Currently there isn't anything pushing us to do a 7.10.2 release at least for a few more weeks it looks like - but see below. We puzzled a bit about the release status of 7.10.2, and thought: it's only holding up people who are depending on it. So, who's depending on it, and what do they need fixed? See below for more. We also talked a bit about performance - it seems the compiler has been getting much slower over time since the 7.8.x release series, and it's time to reign it in. Austin will be spending his week investigating a bit of this, and the causes. 7.10.2 Status So, you may be wondering when the 7.10.2 release is. The trick is it happens when you tell us it should happen! So far, taking a look at milestone:7.10.2, we've fixed about half the bugs we currently have marked down to fix. But we're probably going to punt some of those - and we're not sure all the ones that are there should be. So this is a call: If you need something to be fixed during 7.10.2, please file a ticket, set the milestone, and alert us. The sooner the better, because it'll inform us as to when we should release. Emailing [email protected] is also a sure-fire way to get our attention. And remember: you can always find out the latest about the next release at the Status page (in this case, for 7.10.2) - ​https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Status/GHC-7.10.2 Call for help: DocBook to AsciiDoc The GHC team needs some help. A few months ago, we put out a poll to convert our DocBook-based manual to AsciiDoc. The poll had a mostly lukewarm reception, with the idea that it will A) make life easier for people who frequently modify the users guide, and B) make life easier for people who add things irregularly, as a lower barrier to entry. It looks like we still want to do this - but alas, many of us don't have time! So, we're asking the public: Is anyone willing to step up and help here? For example, it may be possible to get a long ways with just pandoc, but we need someone to finish it - and in return, we'll help along the way! List chatter Austin Seipp announced GHC 7.10.1. ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-March/008700.html Mark Lentczner announced an alpha Haskell Platform release. ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-March/008724.html David Macek announced MSYS2 packages for GHC on Windows, and also asked for some help with continuous windows building - Windows hackers should help out! ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-March/008735.html Jan Stolarek reports about increased memory usage with GHC 7.10.1. ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-April/008751.html Thomas Miedema chimed into a thread started by Karel Gardas about better parallelizing the GHC build - and hopefully we can get something good out of it. ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-April/008749.html Austin Seipp made a call for help on working on and improving the GHC homepage, and luckily Sergey Bushnyak answered the call and has helped out! ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-April/008762.html Ozgun Ataman kicked off a thread about slower compilation times, with some nasty numbers. It's becoming more clear compiler performance should be a priority for 7.12, and we've let some things slip away from us: ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-April/008766.html A GHC user, Dave, asked the list about some questions with Cross Compilation, as he's attempting to get GHC to work natively inside the Open Embedded build environment. Unfortunately, things haven't been going well so far, and any input from enterprising hackers is appreciated: ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-April/008774.html Dan Aloni has started a discussion about improving GHC's error messages, spurred by a popular blog post he wrote and posted on Reddit about some Happy/GHC improvements he's made. This is a difficult area (error messages in general are hard) to work on, so thanks to Dan for helping! ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-April/008778.html Simon Peyton Jones started a discussion about GeneralizedNewtypeDeriving and Safe Haskell, in particular, whatever the current status, our documentation doesn't accurately reflect it! Perhaps someone could help out writing the documentation based on the current status quo? ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-April/008783.html Tamar Christina started a thread about replacing ghc-split, an old Perl script inside GHC, but he wanted to know: what do we do about a regex replacement? Mikhail Glushenkov spoke up about a similar decision the LLVM developers used: to use the OpenBSD regex implementation. ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-April/008785.html Alan Zimmerman has posted several questions and threads about the parser and the status of API annotations, which he's been furiously working on now that GHC 7.10 is being used on Hackage. Interested onlookers could learn a thing or two! ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-April/008782.html & ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-April/008787.html & ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-April/008794.html Gabor Greif has a question about some seemingly strange behavior regarding the interaction between poly-kinded data types and overlapping instances. Richard sez: this behavior is expected. ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-April/008804.html Noteworthy commits Commit de1160be047790afde4ec76de0a81ba3be0c73fa - refactor the story around switch cases (with a code-size improvement) Commit 995e8c1c8692b60c907c7d2ccea179d52ca8e69e - drop old integer-gmp-0.5 source code. Commit 59f7a7b6091e9c0564f3f370d09398d8c9cd8ad5 - Restore unwind information generation (fixes DWARF generation) Commit 9f0f99fd41ff82cc223d3b682703e508efb564d2 - Fix an old bug in the demand analyzer (with some nice compiler performance boosts). Commit a7524eaed33324e2155c47d4a705bef1d70a2b5b - Support for multiple signature files in scope (Backpack). Closed tickets #10222, #10219, #8057, #10226, #10220, #9723, #10230, #10208, #10236, #10213, #10231, #10240, #10243, #10237, #10224, #8811, #10197, #10252, #9958, #10253, #8248, #10207, #10214, #9964, #10194, #10251, #10188, #10257, #10247, #10247, #9160, #10259, #9965, #10265, #10264, #10286, #10282, #10290, #10291, #10300, #9929, #8276, #10218, #10148, #10232, #10274, #10275, #10195, and #10233. [Less]

Hi *, It's been a few weeks since the last news bulletin - your editor apologizes about that. It's actually been a relatively slow few weeks here too, and busy-ness outside of GHC has attracted some of my attention. Despite that, GHC 7.10.1 was ... [More] released, a new HP alpha is out, and things are moving along smoothly. Now that the release is done, things are quitely moving along in HEAD - with people committing code with reckless abandon, of course. This week, GHC HQ met up, but it's been very light since the 7.10.1 release. Currently there isn't anything pushing us to do a 7.10.2 release at least for a few more weeks it looks like - but see below. We puzzled a bit about the release status of 7.10.2, and thought: it's only holding up people who are depending on it. So, who's depending on it, and what do they need fixed? See below for more. We also talked a bit about performance - it seems the compiler has been getting much slower over time since the 7.8.x release series, and it's time to reign it in. Austin will be spending his week investigating a bit of this, and the causes. 7.10.2 Status So, you may be wondering when the 7.10.2 release is. The trick is it happens when you tell us it should happen! So far, taking a look at milestone:7.10.2, we've fixed about half the bugs we currently have marked down to fix. But we're probably going to punt some of those - and we're not sure all the ones that are there should be. So this is a call: If you need something to be fixed during 7.10.2, please file a ticket, set the milestone, and alert us. The sooner the better, because it'll inform us as to when we should release. Emailing [email protected] is also a sure-fire way to get our attention. And remember: you can always find out the latest about the next release at the Status page (in this case, for 7.10.2) - ​https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Status/GHC-7.10.2 Call for help: DocBook to AsciiDoc The GHC team needs some help. A few months ago, we put out a poll to convert our DocBook-based manual to AsciiDoc. The poll had a mostly lukewarm reception, with the idea that it will A) make life easier for people who frequently modify the users guide, and B) make life easier for people who add things irregularly, as a lower barrier to entry. It looks like we still want to do this - but alas, many of us don't have time! So, we're asking the public: Is anyone willing to step up and help here? For example, it may be possible to get a long ways with just pandoc, but we need someone to finish it - and in return, we'll help along the way! List chatter Austin Seipp announced GHC 7.10.1. ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-March/008700.html Mark Lentczner announced an alpha Haskell Platform release. ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-March/008724.html David Macek announced MSYS2 packages for GHC on Windows, and also asked for some help with continuous windows building - Windows hackers should help out! ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-March/008735.html Jan Stolarek reports about increased memory usage with GHC 7.10.1. ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-April/008751.html Thomas Miedema chimed into a thread started by Karel Gardas about better parallelizing the GHC build - and hopefully we can get something good out of it. ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-April/008749.html Austin Seipp made a call for help on working on and improving the GHC homepage, and luckily Sergey Bushnyak answered the call and has helped out! ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-April/008762.html Ozgun Ataman kicked off a thread about slower compilation times, with some nasty numbers. It's becoming more clear compiler performance should be a priority for 7.12, and we've let some things slip away from us: ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-April/008766.html A GHC user, Dave, asked the list about some questions with Cross Compilation, as he's attempting to get GHC to work natively inside the Open Embedded build environment. Unfortunately, things haven't been going well so far, and any input from enterprising hackers is appreciated: ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-April/008774.html Dan Aloni has started a discussion about improving GHC's error messages, spurred by a popular blog post he wrote and posted on Reddit about some Happy/GHC improvements he's made. This is a difficult area (error messages in general are hard) to work on, so thanks to Dan for helping! ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-April/008778.html Simon Peyton Jones started a discussion about GeneralizedNewtypeDeriving and Safe Haskell, in particular, whatever the current status, our documentation doesn't accurately reflect it! Perhaps someone could help out writing the documentation based on the current status quo? ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-April/008783.html Tamar Christina started a thread about replacing ghc-split, an old Perl script inside GHC, but he wanted to know: what do we do about a regex replacement? Mikhail Glushenkov spoke up about a similar decision the LLVM developers used: to use the OpenBSD regex implementation. ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-April/008785.html Alan Zimmerman has posted several questions and threads about the parser and the status of API annotations, which he's been furiously working on now that GHC 7.10 is being used on Hackage. Interested onlookers could learn a thing or two! ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-April/008782.html & ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-April/008787.html & ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-April/008794.html Gabor Greif has a question about some seemingly strange behavior regarding the interaction between poly-kinded data types and overlapping instances. Richard sez: this behavior is expected. ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-April/008804.html Noteworthy commits Commit de1160be047790afde4ec76de0a81ba3be0c73fa - refactor the story around switch cases (with a code-size improvement) Commit 995e8c1c8692b60c907c7d2ccea179d52ca8e69e - drop old integer-gmp-0.5 source code. Commit 59f7a7b6091e9c0564f3f370d09398d8c9cd8ad5 - Restore unwind information generation (fixes DWARF generation) Commit 9f0f99fd41ff82cc223d3b682703e508efb564d2 - Fix an old bug in the demand analyzer (with some nice compiler performance boosts). Commit a7524eaed33324e2155c47d4a705bef1d70a2b5b - Support for multiple signature files in scope (Backpack). Closed tickets #10222, #10219, #8057, #10226, #10220, #9723, #10230, #10208, #10236, #10213, #10231, #10240, #10243, #10237, #10224, #8811, #10197, #10252, #9958, #10253, #8248, #10207, #10214, #9964, #10194, #10251, #10188, #10257, #10247, #10247, #9160, #10259, #9965, #10265, #10264, #10286, #10282, #10290, #10291, #10300, #9929, #8276, #10218, #10148, #10232, #10274, #10275, #10195, and #10233. [Less]

Hi *, It's been a few weeks since the last news bulletin - your editor apologizes about that. It's actually been a relatively slow few weeks here too, and busy-ness outside of GHC has attracted some of my attention. Despite that, GHC 7.10.1 was ... [More] released, a new HP alpha is out, and things are moving along smoothly. Now that the release is done, things are quitely moving along in HEAD - with people committing code with reckless abandon, of course. This week, GHC HQ met up, but it's been very light since the 7.10.1 release. Currently there isn't anything pushing us to do a 7.10.2 release at least for a few more weeks it looks like - but see below. We puzzled a bit about the release status of 7.10.2, and thought: it's only holding up people who are depending on it. So, who's depending on it, and what do they need fixed? See below for more. We also talked a bit about performance - it seems the compiler has been getting much slower over time since the 7.8.x release series, and it's time to reign it in. Austin will be spending his week investigating a bit of this, and the causes. 7.10.2 Status So, you may be wondering when the 7.10.2 release is. The trick is it happens when you tell us it should happen! So far, taking a look at milestone:7.10.2, we've fixed about half the bugs we currently have marked down to fix. But we're probably going to punt some of those - and we're not sure all the ones that are there should be. So this is a call: If you need something to be fixed during 7.10.2, please file a ticket, set the milestone, and alert us. The sooner the better, because it'll inform us as to when we should release. Emailing [email protected] is also a sure-fire way to get our attention. And remember: you can always find out the latest about the next release at the Status page (in this case, for 7.10.2) - ​https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Status/GHC-7.10.2 Call for help: DocBook to AsciiDoc The GHC team needs some help. A few months ago, we put out a poll to convert our DocBook-based manual to AsciiDoc. The poll had a mostly lukewarm reception, with the idea that it will A) make life easier for people who frequently modify the users guide, and B) make life easier for people who add things irregularly, as a lower barrier to entry. It looks like we still want to do this - but alas, many of us don't have time! So, we're asking the public: Is anyone willing to step up and help here? For example, it may be possible to get a long ways with just pandoc, but we need someone to finish it - and in return, we'll help along the way! List chatter Austin Seipp announced GHC 7.10.1. ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-March/008700.html Mark Lentczner announced an alpha Haskell Platform release. ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-March/008724.html David Macek announced MSYS2 packages for GHC on Windows, and also asked for some help with continuous windows building - Windows hackers should help out! ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-March/008735.html Jan Stolarek reports about increased memory usage with GHC 7.10.1. ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-April/008751.html Thomas Miedema chimed into a thread started by Karel Gardas about better parallelizing the GHC build - and hopefully we can get something good out of it. ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-April/008749.html Austin Seipp made a call for help on working on and improving the GHC homepage, and luckily Sergey Bushnyak answered the call and has helped out! ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-April/008762.html Ozgun Ataman kicked off a thread about slower compilation times, with some nasty numbers. It's becoming more clear compiler performance should be a priority for 7.12, and we've let some things slip away from us: ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-April/008766.html A GHC user, Dave, asked the list about some questions with Cross Compilation, as he's attempting to get GHC to work natively inside the Open Embedded build environment. Unfortunately, things haven't been going well so far, and any input from enterprising hackers is appreciated: ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-April/008774.html Dan Aloni has started a discussion about improving GHC's error messages, spurred by a popular blog post he wrote and posted on Reddit about some Happy/GHC improvements he's made. This is a difficult area (error messages in general are hard) to work on, so thanks to Dan for helping! ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-April/008778.html Simon Peyton Jones started a discussion about GeneralizedNewtypeDeriving and Safe Haskell, in particular, whatever the current status, our documentation doesn't accurately reflect it! Perhaps someone could help out writing the documentation based on the current status quo? ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-April/008783.html Tamar Christina started a thread about replacing ghc-split, an old Perl script inside GHC, but he wanted to know: what do we do about a regex replacement? Mikhail Glushenkov spoke up about a similar decision the LLVM developers used: to use the OpenBSD regex implementation. ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-April/008785.html Alan Zimmerman has posted several questions and threads about the parser and the status of API annotations, which he's been furiously working on now that GHC 7.10 is being used on Hackage. Interested onlookers could learn a thing or two! ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-April/008782.html & ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-April/008787.html & ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-April/008794.html Gabor Greif has a question about some seemingly strange behavior regarding the interaction between poly-kinded data types and overlapping instances. Richard sez: this behavior is expected. ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-April/008804.html Noteworthy commits Commit de1160be047790afde4ec76de0a81ba3be0c73fa - refactor the story around switch cases (with a code-size improvement) Commit 995e8c1c8692b60c907c7d2ccea179d52ca8e69e - drop old integer-gmp-0.5 source code. Commit 59f7a7b6091e9c0564f3f370d09398d8c9cd8ad5 - Restore unwind information generation (fixes DWARF generation) Commit 9f0f99fd41ff82cc223d3b682703e508efb564d2 - Fix an old bug in the demand analyzer (with some nice compiler performance boosts). Commit a7524eaed33324e2155c47d4a705bef1d70a2b5b - Support for multiple signature files in scope (Backpack). Closed tickets #10222, #10219, #8057, #10226, #10220, #9723, #10230, #10208, #10236, #10213, #10231, #10240, #10243, #10237, #10224, #8811, #10197, #10252, #9958, #10253, #8248, #10207, #10214, #9964, #10194, #10251, #10188, #10257, #10247, #10247, #9160, #10259, #9965, #10265, #10264, #10286, #10282, #10290, #10291, #10300, #9929, #8276, #10218, #10148, #10232, #10274, #10275, #10195, and #10233. [Less]

Hi *, It's been a few weeks since the last news bulletin - your editor apologizes about that. It's actually been a relatively slow few weeks here too, and busy-ness outside of GHC has attracted some of my attention. Despite that, GHC 7.10.1 was ... [More] released, a new HP alpha is out, and things are moving along smoothly. Now that the release is done, things are quitely moving along in HEAD - with people committing code with reckless abandon, of course. This week, GHC HQ met up, but it's been very light since the 7.10.1 release. Currently there isn't anything pushing us to do a 7.10.2 release at least for a few more weeks it looks like - but see below. We puzzled a bit about the release status of 7.10.2, and thought: it's only holding up people who are depending on it. So, who's depending on it, and what do they need fixed? See below for more. We also talked a bit about performance - it seems the compiler has been getting much slower over time since the 7.8.x release series, and it's time to reign it in. Austin will be spending his week investigating a bit of this, and the causes. 7.10.2 Status So, you may be wondering when the 7.10.2 release is. The trick is it happens when you tell us it should happen! So far, taking a look at milestone:7.10.2, we've fixed about half the bugs we currently have marked down to fix. But we're probably going to punt some of those - and we're not sure all the ones that are there should be. So this is a call: If you need something to be fixed during 7.10.2, please file a ticket, set the milestone, and alert us. The sooner the better, because it'll inform us as to when we should release. Emailing [email protected] is also a sure-fire way to get our attention. And remember: you can always find out the latest about the next release at the Status page (in this case, for 7.10.2) - ​https://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Status/GHC-7.10.2 Call for help: DocBook to AsciiDoc The GHC team needs some help. A few months ago, we put out a poll to convert our DocBook-based manual to AsciiDoc. The poll had a mostly lukewarm reception, with the idea that it will A) make life easier for people who frequently modify the users guide, and B) make life easier for people who add things irregularly, as a lower barrier to entry. It looks like we still want to do this - but alas, many of us don't have time! So, we're asking the public: Is anyone willing to step up and help here? For example, it may be possible to get a long ways with just pandoc, but we need someone to finish it - and in return, we'll help along the way! List chatter Austin Seipp announced GHC 7.10.1. ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-March/008700.html Mark Lentczner announced an alpha Haskell Platform release. ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-March/008724.html David Macek announced MSYS2 packages for GHC on Windows, and also asked for some help with continuous windows building - Windows hackers should help out! ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-March/008735.html Jan Stolarek reports about increased memory usage with GHC 7.10.1. ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-April/008751.html Thomas Miedema chimed into a thread started by Karel Gardas about better parallelizing the GHC build - and hopefully we can get something good out of it. ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-April/008749.html Austin Seipp made a call for help on working on and improving the GHC homepage, and luckily Sergey Bushnyak answered the call and has helped out! ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-April/008762.html Ozgun Ataman kicked off a thread about slower compilation times, with some nasty numbers. It's becoming more clear compiler performance should be a priority for 7.12, and we've let some things slip away from us: ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-April/008766.html A GHC user, Dave, asked the list about some questions with Cross Compilation, as he's attempting to get GHC to work natively inside the Open Embedded build environment. Unfortunately, things haven't been going well so far, and any input from enterprising hackers is appreciated: ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-April/008774.html Dan Aloni has started a discussion about improving GHC's error messages, spurred by a popular blog post he wrote and posted on Reddit about some Happy/GHC improvements he's made. This is a difficult area (error messages in general are hard) to work on, so thanks to Dan for helping! ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-April/008778.html Simon Peyton Jones started a discussion about GeneralizedNewtypeDeriving and Safe Haskell, in particular, whatever the current status, our documentation doesn't accurately reflect it! Perhaps someone could help out writing the documentation based on the current status quo? ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-April/008783.html Tamar Christina started a thread about replacing ghc-split, an old Perl script inside GHC, but he wanted to know: what do we do about a regex replacement? Mikhail Glushenkov spoke up about a similar decision the LLVM developers used: to use the OpenBSD regex implementation. ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-April/008785.html Alan Zimmerman has posted several questions and threads about the parser and the status of API annotations, which he's been furiously working on now that GHC 7.10 is being used on Hackage. Interested onlookers could learn a thing or two! ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-April/008782.html & ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-April/008787.html & ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-April/008794.html Gabor Greif has a question about some seemingly strange behavior regarding the interaction between poly-kinded data types and overlapping instances. Richard sez: this behavior is expected. ​https://mail.haskell.org/pipermail/ghc-devs/2015-April/008804.html Noteworthy commits Commit de1160be047790afde4ec76de0a81ba3be0c73fa - refactor the story around switch cases (with a code-size improvement) Commit 995e8c1c8692b60c907c7d2ccea179d52ca8e69e - drop old integer-gmp-0.5 source code. Commit 59f7a7b6091e9c0564f3f370d09398d8c9cd8ad5 - Restore unwind information generation (fixes DWARF generation) Commit 9f0f99fd41ff82cc223d3b682703e508efb564d2 - Fix an old bug in the demand analyzer (with some nice compiler performance boosts). Commit a7524eaed33324e2155c47d4a705bef1d70a2b5b - Support for multiple signature files in scope (Backpack). Closed tickets #10222, #10219, #8057, #10226, #10220, #9723, #10230, #10208, #10236, #10213, #10231, #10240, #10243, #10237, #10224, #8811, #10197, #10252, #9958, #10253, #8248, #10207, #10214, #9964, #10194, #10251, #10188, #10257, #10247, #10247, #9160, #10259, #9965, #10265, #10264, #10286, #10282, #10290, #10291, #10300, #9929, #8276, #10218, #10148, #10232, #10274, #10275, #10195, and #10233. [Less]