We are pleased to announce the Thanksgiving-99 Preview release of STGHugs98 an interpreter for the non-strict functional language Haskell. This preview release has a web page: http://www.cse.ogi.edu/PacSoft/projects/Hugs/thrills.htm STG-Hugs is the next generation of Hugs interpreter. It includes the front end and features of November 1999 Hugs98, but has an entirely new backend. STGHugs98 uses the same execution model and runtime system as GHC executables, so the garbage collection technology is much stronger in STGHugs98, and later STGHugs98 will include better support for parallelism, concurrency, and profiling. Rewriting the back end has allowed us to make many minor enhancements -- for example, STGHugs really implements Doubles properly, making it much more suitable than Hugs98 for numerical experimentation. This is a hackers release. It is intended as a technology preview, allowing the curious to experiment with the new technologies we are developing. It also includes stronger FFI support than November Hugs98. We have tried hard to make STGHugs98 stable enough to be useful. However, for production work we recommend that you stick with the the stable "November 99 Hugs98" release. You will probably want to try STGHugs98 if you need the new FFI features, or are just plain curious. As far as stability goes, STGHugs98 has been tested on a large fraction of the standard tests for GHC. We can also correctly run most of the programs in the "nofib" benchmark suite associated with GHC, including most of the large programs in the "real" section of nofib. Those that fail primarily do so because they require non-standard library support which we have not yet implemented, rather than as a result of unknown problems in STGHugs' compilation or execution machinery. At the moment STGHugs98 supports the standard Haskell98 libraries (as provided by November 1999 Hugs98). Primop support for many of the GHC extension libraries, for example for concurrency, is implemented and working, but is not yet "officially" available in the libraries. We expect to release a public version of STGHugs98 in the spring of 2000. STGHugs98 is available in source form, as an integral part of the GHC source tree. For convenience, we also provide pre-built packages for Windows NT 4.0 and x86 Red Hat Linux 5.2 and 6.0. STGHugs98 executes Haskell programs as fast or faster than Classic Hugs98, however for this preview release the precompiled binaries have debugging turned on, so are slightly slower. STGHugs98 is distributed under the same open-source license that now graces the Glasgow Haskell Compiler itself. Please do download and try STGHugs. We're very pleased that it is looking good at this stage, and we would love your feedback. The STGHugs Team: primary contacts Julian Seward (Cambridge) [EMAIL PROTECTED] Andy Gill (OGI) [EMAIL PROTECTED] with tireless RTS hacking support from Simon Marlow Most of the StgHugs back end was created by Alastair Reid
