
           ===============================================
            The Glasgow Haskell Compiler -- version 8.2.1
           ===============================================

The GHC Team is pleased to announce a new major release of GHC. The themes of this 
release have been performance, stability, and consolidation. Consequently
cleanups can be seen throughout the compiler,

 * Significant improvements in compiler performance

 * More robust support for levity polymorphism

 * Reliable DWARF debugging information

 * Improved runtime system performance on NUMA systems

 * Retooling of the cost-center profiler, including support for live streaming
   of profile data via the GHC event log

 * Deterministic interface files

 * More robust treatment of join points, enabling significantly better code
   generation in many cases

 * Numerous improvements in robustness on Windows

 * Resolution of over 500 tickets

In addition, there are a number of new features,

 * A new more type-safe Typeable mechanism

 * The long-awaited Backpack module system

 * Deriving strategies to disambiguate between GHC's various instance deriving
   mechanisms

 * Unboxed sums types, for efficient unpacked representation of sum data types

 * Compact regions, allowing better control over garbage collection with in the
   presence of large heaps containing many long-lived objects.

 * Colorful messages and caret diagnostics for more legible errors

 * Automatic support for using the faster gold and lld linkers when available

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

  http://haskell.org/ghc/docs/8.2.1/html/users_guide/release-8-2-1.html


How to get it
~~~~~~~~~~~~~

The easy way is to go to the web page, which should be self-explanatory:

        http://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.

Packages will appear as they are built - if the package for your
system isn't available yet, please try again later.


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:

GHC home page              http://www.haskell.org/ghc/
GHC developers' home page  http://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/
Haskell home page          http://www.haskell.org/


Supported Platforms
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

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

   http://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Contributors

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

    http://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/wiki/Building


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:

  http://ghc.haskell.org/trac/ghc/


Mailing lists
~~~~~~~~~~~~~

We run mailing lists for GHC users and bug reports; to subscribe, use
the web interfaces at

    http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/glasgow-haskell-users
    http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ghc-tickets

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

    https://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo

Some GHC developers hang out on #haskell on IRC, too:

    http://www.haskell.org/haskellwiki/IRC_channel

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

    http://www.haskell.org/ghc/reportabug

