The GHC developers are very pleased to announce the availability of the
first alpha prerelease of GHC 9.14.1. Binary distributions, source
distributions, and documentation are available at
[downloads.haskell.org].

GHC 9.14 will bring a number of new features and improvements,
including:

 * Significant improvements in specialisation:
    * The SPECIALISE pragma now allows use of type application syntax

    * The SPECIALISE pragma can be used to specialise for expression
      arguments as well as type arguments.

    * Specialisation is now considerably more reliable in the presence
      of newtypes

    * the specialiser is now able to produce specialisations with
      polymorphic typeclass constraints, considerably broadening its
      scope.

 * Significant improvements in the GHCi debugger

 * Record fields can be defined to be non-linear when LinearTypes is
   enabled.

 * RequiredTypeArgments can now be used in more contexts

 * SSE/AVX spport in the x86 native code generator backend

 * A major update of the Windows toolchain

 * ... and many more

A full accounting of changes can be found in the release notes [1]. Given
the many specialisation improvements and their potential for regression,
we would very much appreciate testing and performance characterisation
on downstream workloads.

Due to unexpected complications, this initial prerelease comes a bit
later than expected. Consequently, we expect to have only two alphas
prior to the release candidate, in contrast to the scheduled three. We
expect the next alpha will come the seek of 9 Sept. 2025, while the
third will come 23 Sept. 2025, with the release candidate coming 7 Oct.
2025.

We would like to thank the Zw3rk stake pool, Well-Typed, Mercury,
Channable, Tweag I/O, Serokell, SimSpace, the Haskell Foundation, and
other anonymous contributors whose on-going financial and in-kind
support has facilitated GHC maintenance and release management over the
years. Finally, this release would not have been possible without the
hundreds of open-source contributors whose work comprise this release.

As always, do give this release a try and open a [ticket] if you see
anything amiss.


[downloads.haskell.org]: https://downloads.haskell.org/ghc/9.14.1-alpha1
[release notes]: 
https://downloads.haskell.org/ghc/9.14.1-alpha1/docs/users_guide/9.14.1-notes.html
[ticket]: https://gitlab.haskell.org/ghc/homepage/-/issues/new

Attachment: signature.asc
Description: PGP signature

_______________________________________________
ghc-devs mailing list
ghc-devs@haskell.org
http://mail.haskell.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/ghc-devs

Reply via email to